21–30 of 274 posts
Genuine question: is there any reason to use Swift without iOS/SwiftUI? (Outside of devs who are primarily Swift developers that want to use something they already know for a small project or similar.)
It's not perfect, but I hope it continues to flourish because it gets a lot right
Swift 6 is amazing - I say this as a big Rust person. It seems like Swift is now its own entity outside the Apple bubble and has a few very interesting features: - An "embedded" mode that turns off reflection for kilobyte-sized binaries - An upcoming WASM target - An LSP for VSCode - Native C++ interop - Typed "throws" - Static linking on linux and the linux sdk - Porting a number of "core foundation" / foundation pr…
I find myself reaching for Swift as the default for a lot of things rather than Rust, especially with the advent of C++ Interoperability and the new Swift embedded stack and ownership model.
The only thing I really need is a UI story on other platforms, but it’s an area Rust is lacking great solutions too. I suspect the C++ interop might eventually make Swift have great Qt bindings to compete with PySide as an accessible way to make multi platform UIs.
> Additionally, a program built for a particular distribution, or even a particular major version of a particular distribution, would not necessarily run on any other distribution or in some cases even on a different major version of the same distribution. Not sure I understand that. Is it something specific to Swift, or is it exactly what is expected from using shared libraries? Say my Linux distribution distributes…
It's just classic dependency issues. I'm not familiar with swift specifics, but probably a combination of ABI instability and just plain version incompatibility from one distro to the next with your target program. My opinion is the opposite: I think the old paradigm of distros managing a giant set of system libraries is a bad one, and is how we ended up in the land of docker. Go and Rust made the right decisions her…
Until there's a vulnerability in one of the dependencies and now you have to rebuild all of the packages which use it. Specifically for Rust, there's also the fact that most projects use a lock file and if your build process respects it, you now have to wait for the upstream to update it and release a new version (or update it yourself). And if your build process doesn't respect the lock file (or the project doesn't use it) and you just fetch the latest compatible dependencies at the time of build, you now have no idea if you're affected or not by the vulnerability because you don't have the exact resolved versions stored anywhere (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2801).
Swift 6 is amazing - I say this as a big Rust person. It seems like Swift is now its own entity outside the Apple bubble and has a few very interesting features: - An "embedded" mode that turns off reflection for kilobyte-sized binaries - An upcoming WASM target - An LSP for VSCode - Native C++ interop - Typed "throws" - Static linking on linux and the linux sdk - Porting a number of "core foundation" / foundation pr…
How’s the compilation speed?If it’s going to replace Go, that’s gotta be sub second for a medium sized project on my clunky old laptop.
It’s a much more powerful language. In my opinion slower compilation is worth it for all of its great features. (Does Go even have parametric enums?). But its definitely a trade off.
Swift 6 is amazing - I say this as a big Rust person. It seems like Swift is now its own entity outside the Apple bubble and has a few very interesting features: - An "embedded" mode that turns off reflection for kilobyte-sized binaries - An upcoming WASM target - An LSP for VSCode - Native C++ interop - Typed "throws" - Static linking on linux and the linux sdk - Porting a number of "core foundation" / foundation pr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just classic dependency issues. I'm not familiar with swift specifics, but probably a combination of ABI instability and just plain version incompatibility from one distro to the next with your target program. My opinion is the opposite: I think the old paradigm of distros managing a giant set of system libraries is a bad one, and is how we ended up in the land of docker. Go and Rust made the right decisions her…
Some distros do actually break out rust dependencies into separate packages (e.g. Guix does this). It's just that a lot of rust software isn't distributed primarily by distros.
> Additionally, a program built for a particular distribution, or even a particular major version of a particular distribution, would not necessarily run on any other distribution or in some cases even on a different major version of the same distribution. Not sure I understand that. Is it something specific to Swift, or is it exactly what is expected from using shared libraries? Say my Linux distribution distributes…
It's just classic dependency issues. I'm not familiar with swift specifics, but probably a combination of ABI instability and just plain version incompatibility from one distro to the next with your target program. My opinion is the opposite: I think the old paradigm of distros managing a giant set of system libraries is a bad one, and is how we ended up in the land of docker. Go and Rust made the right decisions her…
The whole point of a distro is that someone distributes them, so you can choose which distro you want to trust.
What I don't like about Rust and Go is that they enforce their preference. I am fine if you want to link everything statically. I just don't want you to force me.
> Additionally, a program built for a particular distribution, or even a particular major version of a particular distribution, would not necessarily run on any other distribution or in some cases even on a different major version of the same distribution. Not sure I understand that. Is it something specific to Swift, or is it exactly what is expected from using shared libraries? Say my Linux distribution distributes…
It's just classic dependency issues. I'm not familiar with swift specifics, but probably a combination of ABI instability and just plain version incompatibility from one distro to the next with your target program. My opinion is the opposite: I think the old paradigm of distros managing a giant set of system libraries is a bad one, and is how we ended up in the land of docker. Go and Rust made the right decisions her…
Swift 6 is amazing - I say this as a big Rust person. It seems like Swift is now its own entity outside the Apple bubble and has a few very interesting features: - An "embedded" mode that turns off reflection for kilobyte-sized binaries - An upcoming WASM target - An LSP for VSCode - Native C++ interop - Typed "throws" - Static linking on linux and the linux sdk - Porting a number of "core foundation" / foundation pr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How’s the compilation speed?If it’s going to replace Go, that’s gotta be sub second for a medium sized project on my clunky old laptop.
Why, would you care if it's a full second or even 5 seconds? Go hyped their compilation speed a lot in its early years, but unless it's C++ templates level slugginess it's not like it's that big of deal.