Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What’s new in Swift 6.2

hackingwithswift.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 258 posts

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#51

Post by 0rzech »

nulld3v wrote: post #46
90s_dev wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just seems to me that this is the exactly wrong way to solve a programming problem. If the problem boils down to "I want some variables (almost always test function names) to be more human readable", the solution should never be "hey let's add this feature to the core language and make identifiers use any ASCII string! I dunno, maybe I'm wrong here and being overly critical. But to me it just screams "Swift has lo…

Many languages have had this feature for a long time. Ruby, ~~Rust,~~ Kotlin, etc... It hasn't been an issue at all. I like that most languages seem to have reached consensus on backticks or other similarily awkward characters for this feature. Typing these identifiers is like hitting a speed bump, which seems to be enough to make devs avoid them except for very specific use-cases.

Rust does not have this feature. Function names can't have spaces, for example. Underscores are used instead. Maybe there are some macros for arbitrary ASCII strings - I don't know - but it's not a language feature.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#52

Post by [deleted] »

90s_dev wrote: post #7
90s_dev wrote: post #5

> So, rather than writing > > @Test("Strip HTML tags from string") func stripHTMLTagsFromString() {...} > > we can instead write > > @Test func `Strip HTML tags from string`() {...} Maybe I'm just really new at programming, but this seems like an absolutely bad feature, and the example actually perfectly proves it: You really want to name a function "Hello World!" instead of helloWorld, just so your stack traces can…

It just seems to me that this is the exactly wrong way to solve a programming problem. If the problem boils down to "I want some variables (almost always test function names) to be more human readable", the solution should never be "hey let's add this feature to the core language and make identifiers use any ASCII string! I dunno, maybe I'm wrong here and being overly critical. But to me it just screams "Swift has lo…

[deleted]

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#53

Post by favorited »

pkulak wrote: post #44
90s_dev wrote: post #3

I have not looked at Swift since I last wrote some around maybe v3. I hear that it's generally not a competitor to Rust, and is only really useful within the Apple ecosystem. Why is it not more useful as a C++ alternative, since I think that's kind of what the initial goal was? Is it just that non-Apple support is new-ish and not yet matured? Or a more fundamental issue?

You can't really say a language with a garbage collector (Swift) is an alternative to one without (Rust, C++, etc), because a lot of the time, the reason someone is using a non-GC language is because they don't want a GC. EDIT: Yes, ref. counting is garbage collection, before the replies blow up. haha

> a language with a garbage collector (Swift)

You can certainly make the case that reference counting is a form of garbage collection, but it is absolutely false to say Swift has "a garbage collector." There is no runtime process that is responsible for collecting garbage – allocated objects are freed deterministically when their reference count hits zero.

The same thing is true of `shared_ptr` instances in C++, and there's certainly no "garbage collector" there, either.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#54

Post by lukeh »

storoj wrote: post #43
arecurrence wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too wish deprecation with migration path was a more common pattern in today's language development. The language has very much needed work and the numerous bugs within Apple's own libraries certainly hasn't helped. That said, some of the, erm, "new ways" to solve problems have been significant advancements. EG: Async/Await was a huge improvement over Combine for a wide variety of scenarios.

IMO async/await and Combine are two completely different things. What is the alternative to Combine's CurrentValueSubject or combineLatest()?

AsyncExtensions implements many Combine-like patterns in structured concurrency.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#55

Post by lukeh »

90s_dev wrote: post #3

I have not looked at Swift since I last wrote some around maybe v3. I hear that it's generally not a competitor to Rust, and is only really useful within the Apple ecosystem. Why is it not more useful as a C++ alternative, since I think that's kind of what the initial goal was? Is it just that non-Apple support is new-ish and not yet matured? Or a more fundamental issue?

Also using it in an embedded Linux project [1]. 75% of code written for this project is Swift. The rest is Dart and C/C++. It’s a productive language.

[1] https://forums.swift.org/t/an-embedded-audio-product-built-w...

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#56

Post by catapps »

I've been starting to use Swift again lately after like four years, and while the language is beautiful & the package management story is now a LOT better with SwiftPM, I found that none of it plays nicely with XCode, Simulator, or anything to do with iOS/macOS development -- its primary use-case!

I found myself awestruck that I *HAD* to use XCode or xcodebuild, and could not just run `swift build` and generate an iOS app.

In the end, I had to:

- compile the .app structure myself

- run codesign manually

- manage the simulator manually

- bundle xcAssets manually

- provide swift linker flags manually targeting the toolchain/sdk I needed

- manually copy an embedded.mobileprovision

It was a good learning experience, but what's the story here? Did Apple just give away Swift to the OSS community and then make no ongoing effort to integrate their platforms nicely into the non-xcode build tooling? Looking into https://github.com/stackotter/swift-bundler

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#57

Post by seankit »

catapps wrote: post #56

I've been starting to use Swift again lately after like four years, and while the language is beautiful & the package management story is now a LOT better with SwiftPM, I found that none of it plays nicely with XCode, Simulator, or anything to do with iOS/macOS development -- its primary use-case! I found myself awestruck that I *HAD* to use XCode or xcodebuild, and could not just run `swift build` and generate an iO…

The Swift language team has recently open sourced swift-build, and the community's assumption is that it was done in order to eventually move everything away from xcodebuild to swift-build, which would let you build an app from swift packages and fully break from Xcode: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-build

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#58

Post by hocuspocus »

madeofpalk wrote: post #17
AnishLaddha wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what advantages does swift offer over go/rust/js/java for server side programming? I always presumed the advantages of swift were native code compilation + top tier integration w/the apple ecosystem.

In my little usage of it (and go and rust), Swift feels like a nice middleground between go and rust. Or, a better (safer) go. I think Swift is vastly underestimated due to it's relation to Apple.

I don't think people care about its relation to Apple, they care about the language ecosystem, roadmap and evolution that were shaped by Apple's needs for iOS and macOS before there was a real attempt at making Swift more general purpose and multi-platform. And now that it's somewhat there, there are better options in almost every dimension.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#59

Post by Hashex129542 »

Mostly nonsense updates.

Swift was my favorite programming language after C++/Java since 2014. I've been faced major updates few times happily. It was one of the most easiest language. But now,

I tried to update a project from Swift 5.x to 6.x which has 150+ source files itself and no external libraries which is written by my own use and it has almost all swift 5.x features. They made up Swift as super hard. I decided not to use Swift 6 anymore and yes I don't need to reduce debugging time, Even though I don't have powerful computer and debugging time isn't matter to me & development time is actual matter to me.

The language itself becomes Rust (the programming language using by aliens). I Hope Swift language is upgrading itself for Aliens or the Swift team is filled with Aliens. Now, I feel ObjC is super easiest language than Swift.

PS: I understand Swift is Corporate Product & upgrading towards SwiftUI than general purpose programming language. I never gonna use Swift 6 even I do use ObjC for my projects.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#60

Post by hocuspocus »

90s_dev wrote: post #35
msie wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, smart people making dumb decisions.

I can't help but think some of the Swift leads just really like Haskell.

Escaping symbols with backticks to circumvent illegal characters and reserved keywords is a feature coming straight from Scala actually.
Post reply on HN