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What’s new in Swift 6.2

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Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#71

Post by tiltowait »

bbatsell wrote: post #14
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…

The HTTPStatus enum example is a good one, but the backtick syntax is _rough_. I would only ever use the Type.case form in practice. The test stuff is basically a way to create BDD-style test names, which is kind of just a preference thing. I can’t envision myself using it for anything other than weird case names (I already use case `default` quite a lot because it’s such a useful word), but maybe some interesting DS…

The backtick syntax for enums is rough, and typing out the full Type.case form negates one of Swift’s niceties (the ability to just type .case if the compiler can tell which enum is in use).

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#72

Post by jimbokun »

codr7 wrote: post #25

There's a lot I love about Swift, but I fear it's quickly becoming too complicated for its own good. There are just so many ways to solve a problem now that it's more or less impossible for someone to be familiar with all of them.

Yeah, I’m not an active Swift developer. But reading this article about all the existing complexity and all the new complexity in this update makes me think Swift has jumped the shark.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#73

Post by wsc981 »

Hashex129542 wrote: post #59

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 decide…

I find 'simple' languages charming. Hence, I still like Objective-C. I also like Lua a lot.

I liked Swift when I tried it a couple of years ago, but it seems overloaded with features these days. I haven't tried Swift UI yet, but I did think the Objective-C approach with xibs, struts and such worked fine.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#74

Post by jimbokun »

amichail wrote: post #34
codr7 wrote: post #25

There's a lot I love about Swift, but I fear it's quickly becoming too complicated for its own good. There are just so many ways to solve a problem now that it's more or less impossible for someone to be familiar with all of them.

Is having too many ways to solve a problem an issue for solo indie developers?

It can be if you keep adding the new way of doing things and then need to debug code that jumps between all the different ways of doing things.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#75

Post by strongpigeon »

hudsonator wrote: post #65
strongpigeon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed about Paul Hudson. He also just seems like a genuinely nice guy. I was kind of shocked to receive an email from him out of the blue last weekend (well, from GitHub, but with his name in the "From" field). Turns out it was about a PR [0] to one of my packages where he fixed typos in the README. [0] https://github.com/visfitness/reorderable/pull/2

[flagged]

I’d love to believe you, but you’re not giving us much to go on with

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#76

Post by elcritch »

travisgriggs wrote: post #63

Honest question. Not trying to troll. One of the pitches in the earlier days was “C/Objective-C OK, but you can’t write safe/next level code with it—-Swift will close that gap.” N years later, it doesn’t feel like there has been a step change in Apple software quality; if anything Apple software feels less solid, and looks cool “look what I did” extension points. I mean, some of the tings you could do with runtime ca…

I feel the same. Apple software quality certainly hasn’t increased. Years back I remember some apps crashing suddenly after updating MacOS. I checked the binary and saw they’d started adding Swift.

Half a decade later it seems like it should be better and Swift stuff should be stabilized. But nope, I’ve had more little glitches in both iOS and MacOS. It’s hard to say it’s due to Swift, and not management priorities. Still it feels partially related to Swift.

Swift’s goals are great, I like the syntax, but the language implementation seems to just special case everything rather than having coherent language design.

That and Swift de-emphasizes Obj-C message passing. I have a pet theory that message passing produces more robust GUI software that’s easier to adapt to complex needs.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#77

Post by jibal »

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.

Zig uses @"arbitrary name"

It's an important feature for FFI, as well as passing operator functions around. (It seems bizarre to me that you can't do `+` in Swift, but I don't know Swift so maybe there's another way to name such functions.)

Also, the Zig library now uses @"..." for variables with the same name as keywords, rather than using ad hoc naming conventions in those cases.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#78

Post by jibal »

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…

Test names are just an example. There are other valid reasons to be able to use arbitrary strings as names--importing functions from other languages and names that clash with keywords, for example.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#79

Post by rcruzeiro »

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…

This is useful for testing. Currently, I need to write both the string name of the text and an identifier based on that name for the function itself. Soon I will only need to write it once. This is not much useful for much else though, and just because you can write code like this, it does not mean you should.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#80

Post by rcruzeiro »

porcoda wrote: post #23
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?

I use it as a C++ alternative on Linux. We ported a substantial code base from C++ to Swift last year and it works great. Performance is better in some places, comparable to C++ in others. Productivity is definitely improved over the C++ codebase. We didn’t use rust for this project after evaluating how that migration would impact how it was designed internally, and we decided it wasn’t the right way to go. I think t…

There is this belief that Swift is not really useful outside of the Apple ecosystem or is somehow clunky, and that could not be farthest from the truth. In fact, having written a few backends in Swift, I can say that the experience of writing a Swift backend on Linux was much more ergonomic than what I am used to with writing Swift for iOS.
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