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

91–100 of 258 posts

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#91

Post by rcruzeiro »

afavour wrote: post #8
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?

There’s a level of self fulfilling prophecy here: people don’t use Swift off Apple platforms because there isn’t a critical mass of people using Swift off Apple platforms. But that said it can be frustrating. A lot of the documentation and tutorials you find out there assume you’re on an Apple platform where, e.g. Foundation APIs are available. And the direction of the language, the features being added etc, very cle…

Knowing which parts of Foundation will explode on your face on Linux is most of the challenge of doing non-Apple Swift code.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#92

Post by raydev »

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.

> languages have had this feature for a long time. Ruby

Yes, that is precisely why I don't like Ruby, it's actually impossible for tools to reason about many things that would make finding bugs before shipping feasible. Big companies like Shopify have to impose a lot of restrictions on it to make it work at scale, which is silly. Just use a different language!

Now Swift may not be in this situation because it's added yet more characters to wrap this nonsense so it is possible to reason about, but it's still just unnecessary, and I will be adding a lint rule against it at work. I don't expect a lot of pushback if any.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#93

Post by ardit33 »

Swift is amateur hour in action by academics that don't value practicality. The new Concurrency was ill thought, and done by people that just perhaps either don't have enough practical experience, or are so enamored with the actor paradigm (erlang) that they had to shove it down the throat in a ecosystem where it is not used that much. No one is really using Swift for distributed programing.

Glad they are backtracking on this, and I hope they start remove features and simplifying things. Swift's enemy is its own self and the people steering int into just an academic exercise, rather than a practical and performant language that can be used in many domains. Server side Swift right now is dead due to all these insane changes.

Hopefully things get better on the server/other non ios domains, but the language needs to get simplified and become practical and fun to use.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#94

Post by ardit33 »

elcritch wrote: post #76
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.…

It is not just the language but the frameworks. SwiftUI is a wreck, and still not mature even after 6-7+ years in 'production'. You still have to drop to UIKit to do advanced UI, and for what it is, SwiftUI is just not practical enough for cases that are not trivial. The trouble is that all new kids/engineer are learning it first, which means software wont get better. Apple need to improve it first, and I don't see advanced folks ditching UIKit anytime soon for advanced UI.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#95

Post by favorited »

pkulak wrote: post #89
favorited wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That reference counting is done at runtime. It’s a runtime garbage collector. It’s different than a generational GC, but it’s GC. Those cycles to increment and decrement a counter attached to every object at ever touch aren’t free. All the downvotes in the world won’t make that free.

> It’s a runtime garbage collector

What does "it" refer to? The function calls to _swift_release_()? Because if function calls are a "garbage collector," then free() is a garbage collector. And if free() is a garbage collector, then the term is too vague to have any useful meaning.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#96

Post by LudwigNagasena »

ardit33 wrote: post #94
elcritch wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

It is not just the language but the frameworks. SwiftUI is a wreck, and still not mature even after 6-7+ years in 'production'. You still have to drop to UIKit to do advanced UI, and for what it is, SwiftUI is just not practical enough for cases that are not trivial. The trouble is that all new kids/engineer are learning it first, which means software wont get better. Apple need to improve it first, and I don't see a…

Seems like another case of the general trend in software development of easy things becoming easier and hard things becoming harder.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#97

Post by hombre_fatal »

sedatk wrote: post #29

Free-form identifiers are neat for test-case naming, but not for `HTTPStatus.`404``. I think having `HTTPStatus.Error404` was a bad idea to begin with. Just use semantic names like `HTTPStatus.NotFound` and you wouldn't have a problem in the first place. Now, a single character typo can easily make a 404, 403 and create a bug. It's less of a problem with semantic names. If you want constrained numeric types in Swift,…

You might mess up 403 vs 401 in this system, but then in the next system you're messing up Unauthorized vs Forbidden.

It's like when you see a poisonous snake and can't remember if "red touches yellow" is paired with "deadly fellow" or "friendly fellow".

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#98

Post by ardit33 »

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 don't use the new concurrency features, as they are one of the main culprits of this mess. (so stick with 5.x)

SwiftUI is a wreck, that is still not good for advanced UI and you still have to use UIKit for some parts, and

Taking Objective-C, with DispatchQueue, and some modernization of it, and some new data structures, which it need, was all it was needed to make a good new langue.

It could have been Apple's rival to GoLang, but instead it ended up being hydra/monster with too many pardagimns, and none of them are good.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#99

Post by ardit33 »

briandear wrote: post #6
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?

Generally only useful within the Apple ecosystem is definitely inaccurate. An example: https://vapor.codes/ The problem is that people only think it’s generally useful in the Apple ecosystem.

They have stalled, and the concurency is making things harder to implement right.

Basically, Vapor has to be re-written as it is, in order to work will with swift 6+. Which kinda kills already any little moment it had.

Was looking to use it with a new project, as it is a nice framework, but going with GoLang on the server side due to all this in flux changes.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#100

Post by 90s_dev »

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.

Now that you mention it, JavaScript has this inherent problem too:

> foo["hello world!"]()

I'm halfway glad I've never needed to write C++ professionally, but it seems to me like all my TypeScript would probably transliterate to very clean C++31.

Post reply on HN