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Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

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Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#161

Post by mpweiher »

Grustaf wrote: post #133
ksec wrote: post #77

Not a popular opinion. Current Apple and Swift felt somewhat like Apple and Dylan in the 90s. May be time could tell. A lot of people hate Objective-C, and was cheering for Swift in 2014. Now nearly a decade later, it seems time and resources could have been spent somewhere else.

What makes you say that? I don't think you can find many developers that would be willing to go back to Objective C.

Not sure why the only alternative to Swift is "going back", particularly when Swift is already going back in many ways.

How about going forward to an alternative that actually isn't a step back.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#162

Post by pkulak »

zarzavat wrote: post #86
djha-skin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not even anything technically interesting about the language. Reference counting? Really? We have so much more than that and you just went with reference counting. Ugh

What would you use instead of ref counting? Swift is an embedded language for Apple’s own chips, they can optimize the hell out of refcounting at silicon level.

Modern, state-of-the-art, generational GC? Not being snarky, that’s literally the comparison.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#163

Post by deaddodo »

Illniyar wrote: post #102
blululu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally valid point that swift is only useful for developing for Apple products, but this same criticism also applies more or less to Kotlin on Android. If you are dealing with iOS it is a joy compared to objective C. I would also add that it is a really nice language in general that is modern, expressive and general ergonomic.

Kotlin wasn't developed for Android. And can be run anywhere. It was JetBrains pet project to fix archaic stuff in Java without making a Scala. It was designed from the get go for a wide base (as wide as java). I'm not sure how it became Android's main target, but I doubt it was the original purpose.

> Kotlin wasn't developed for Android. And can be run anywhere.

I agree and would go so far as to say that Dart is a better comparison to Swift than Kotlin is.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#164

Post by mpweiher »

xenadu02 wrote: post #113
gyrovorbis wrote: post #103

Hot-take from someone who is currently helping to port GNUStep's implementation of the Foundation framework to the Sega Dreamcast: Gross. The whole appeal of Foundation was having this incredibly convenient, beautiful, high-level object-oriented API ontop of low-level, statically compiled performant C... The true path forward for computing is clearly an alliance among the holy trinity of god's C languages: C, C++, an…

Foundation has not been a pure layer on top of CoreFoundation for over a decade. Some class implementations are unified on the ObjC version, not the pure C CoreFoundation version. Objective-C got good enough that all processes on Apple platforms have the objc runtime in their address space whether they want it or not and many pure C or CF-like frameworks are built on ObjC under the covers.

Objective-C was always "good enough", and in fact the rewrite from an Objective-C Foundation to the C-based CoreFoundation saw a huge regression:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.next.advocacy/c/uOQnC1x...

The objections to Objective-C at Apple were always political, not technical, with a very entrenched "no Objective-C, ever" faction. Took a quarter of a century, but it looks like they finally won.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#165

Post by awestroke »

thrwawy74 wrote: post #42

I just... completely don't understand the appeal of Swift beyond it being Apple's in-house language. I was excited for Foundation to become open-source. Using a language you'll really only find in 1 environment is a negative. I'm going to go feel ashamed for not getting excited about a language now. I should be celebrating "more languages", but Swift is just Apple. No one outside Apple chooses Shift unless they want…

The appeal of swift is that it is lightyears better than ObjectiveC. To ObjC developers that are used to being treated like trash by Apple (abysmal documentation, stone age IDE and tooling etc) that's huge

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#166

Post by iainmerrick »

awestroke wrote: post #165
thrwawy74 wrote: post #42

I just... completely don't understand the appeal of Swift beyond it being Apple's in-house language. I was excited for Foundation to become open-source. Using a language you'll really only find in 1 environment is a negative. I'm going to go feel ashamed for not getting excited about a language now. I should be celebrating "more languages", but Swift is just Apple. No one outside Apple chooses Shift unless they want…

The appeal of swift is that it is lightyears better than ObjectiveC. To ObjC developers that are used to being treated like trash by Apple (abysmal documentation, stone age IDE and tooling etc) that's huge

What’s changed there?

I do quite like Swift overall -- it’s usually terser than Obj-C and I like the much stricter and more expressive type system. But you pay for that with much longer compile times, and the tooling feels much the same (Xcode is still Xcode).

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#167

Post by sumuyuda »

awestroke wrote: post #165
thrwawy74 wrote: post #42

I just... completely don't understand the appeal of Swift beyond it being Apple's in-house language. I was excited for Foundation to become open-source. Using a language you'll really only find in 1 environment is a negative. I'm going to go feel ashamed for not getting excited about a language now. I should be celebrating "more languages", but Swift is just Apple. No one outside Apple chooses Shift unless they want…

The appeal of swift is that it is lightyears better than ObjectiveC. To ObjC developers that are used to being treated like trash by Apple (abysmal documentation, stone age IDE and tooling etc) that's huge

Lol, Apple is still treating developers like trash, just a new language now.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#168

Post by balder1991 »

Illniyar wrote: post #102
blululu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally valid point that swift is only useful for developing for Apple products, but this same criticism also applies more or less to Kotlin on Android. If you are dealing with iOS it is a joy compared to objective C. I would also add that it is a really nice language in general that is modern, expressive and general ergonomic.

Kotlin wasn't developed for Android. And can be run anywhere. It was JetBrains pet project to fix archaic stuff in Java without making a Scala. It was designed from the get go for a wide base (as wide as java). I'm not sure how it became Android's main target, but I doubt it was the original purpose.

It was adopted on Android quite fast after Jetbrains made the integration in Android Studio almost flawless, partly because back then the Android runtime was stuck on the Java 6 syntax plus some syntax sugar that the IDE provided to mimic lambda functions.

It helped a lot that I think Jetbrains took advantage of all they could to make development in Kotlin very smooth, I remember back then people joked how Kotlin worked so flawlessly on Android Studio almost like it was the main language while on Xcode Swift was slow, the highlight would stop working constantly, refactoring was not supported, often indexing the project would hang forever etc.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#169

Post by jb1991 »

mpweiher wrote: post #157
jb1991 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it’s true that the language is really only useful on just Apple platforms, it is still quite an amazing language. I have professionally used about half a dozen languages over the last many years, written hundreds of thousands of lines each in all those languages, and swift is a true breath of fresh air. It checks all the boxes for me, very concise and elegant to write, yet very strictly statically typed. A nice…

> upgrade to OO programming with use of protocols How exactly are protocols a Swift "upgrade" to OO programming? They were in Objective-C since the mid 90s, adopted by Java as interfaces, copied by C# etc. Also, protocols in Swift have a huge performance downside, because they decided to have them work across structs and classes: if you use a protocol in a function argument, the compiler doesn't even know the size of…

Strange comment. I never said that Swift invented these language features; not sure what the relevance is that many of its features have existed for a long time and some other languages also offer them. Swift ties together a lot of features that in combination make it quite enjoyable to use. It's fine if you prefer other languages, there is certainly plenty of choice. Speaking of protocols, they offer some significant differences to protocols in ObjC which are very effective for writing saner and less bug-prone code, but I don't want to expound here on all aspects of the language. (there are many other simple features that make a big difference to the coding flow; computed properties, language-level optionals and the syntax surrounding their myriad uses, the list is quite long of good features to speed up safe, productive workflows)

Never had a problem with long compile times -- once you have your initial build, 90% of the time or more the incremental build process is very fast.

The languages I used for about 15 years were ObjC, C, C++, Clojure (and other langs before that). I find Swift to be a thoughtful blend of the key features of these four languages -- each of the things I like most about those langauges are in Swift, but it's the syntax in particular that I like most.

Re: Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift

#170

Post by scns »

singularity2001 wrote: post #112
hedgehog wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience was the opposite, I really like Swift but its usefulness is held back by the lack of a wider community. I'm not sure if that's due to a lack of investment on Apple's part, or maybe that it lives in an unhappy compromise between C++ and Python where there's always a more mature alternative that's good enough, but the language itself is quite nice to write.

Same, I find swift so much more ergonomic and beautiful than rust, but the development story outside (and inside) of xcode is just ugly

AppCode being sunsetted by Jetbrains made me a little sad. Not coding in the Apple ecosystem anymore. Out of IntelliJ, Visual Studio and XCode, it made the worst impression on me
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