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

Swift 6.3

swift.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 239 posts

Re: Swift 6.3

#21

Post by 0x3f »

frizlab wrote: post #12
0x3f wrote: post #6

> Swift is designed to be the language you reach for at every layer of the software stack. It's a nice lang for sure, but this will never be true with the way things are. Such wasted opportunity by Apple.

How so? I can indeed target every layer of the software stack using Swift, today . E.g. ClearSurgery[0] is written fully in Swift, including the real-time components running on the Linux boxes. [0] https://clearsurgery.vision

I _can_ do the same with Rust, doesn't mean it's "the language I reach for" for making e.g. a website. Because the tooling, ergonomics, hireability factor, etc. are still very harshly against it.

Same with Swift, but I'd call that more of a wasted opportunity because Apple, unlike Rust Foundation, has a mountain of money to make it happen, and yet they don't seem to care.

Re: Swift 6.3

#22

Post by willtemperley »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #19
dzonga wrote: post #13

good to see incredible stuff being shipped in Swift. Haven't used it since v3 though. around 2015-17 - Swift could have easily dethroned Python. it was simple enough - very fast - could plug into the C/C++ ecosystem. Hence all the numeric stuff people were doing in Python powered by C++ libraries could've been done with Swift. the server ecosystem was starting to come to life, even supported by IBM. I think the letdo…

That's my read too. Swift was feeling pretty exciting around ~v3. It was small and easy to learn, felt modern, and had solid interop with ObjC/C++. ...but then absolutely exploded in complexity. New features and syntax thrown in make it feel like C++. 10 ways of doing the same thing. I wish they'd kept the language simple and lean, and wrapped additional complexity as optional packages. It just feels like such a smal…

Which keywords would you get rid of and why? You don't have to use all of them!

Re: Swift 6.3

#23

Post by wwalexander »

Re: module name selectors, wasn't this already possible, e.g. ModuleA.getValue()? Though I suppose this disambiguates if you also have a type called ModuleA.

Re: Swift 6.3

#24

Post by WillAdams »

ttflee wrote: post #2

> Swift 6.3 includes the first official release of the Swift SDK for Android.

Anything similar for Windows and Linux?

For Windows there's a 5 year old blog post: https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-on-windows/

For Linux there's a guide for GNOME: https://www.swift.org/blog/adwaita-swift/

It would be really nice if instead we could just do one style of development and then ship a set of libraries as used to work for OpenSTEP (which was why it had "OPEN" in the name).

Re: Swift 6.3

#26

Post by eptcyka »

willtemperley wrote: post #22
iamcalledrob wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my read too. Swift was feeling pretty exciting around ~v3. It was small and easy to learn, felt modern, and had solid interop with ObjC/C++. ...but then absolutely exploded in complexity. New features and syntax thrown in make it feel like C++. 10 ways of doing the same thing. I wish they'd kept the language simple and lean, and wrapped additional complexity as optional packages. It just feels like such a smal…

Which keywords would you get rid of and why? You don't have to use all of them!

You can take this approach in personal projects - with teams you need to decide on this and then on-board people into your use of the language. This does not work.

Re: Swift 6.3

#28

Post by quietbritishjim »

willtemperley wrote: post #22
iamcalledrob wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my read too. Swift was feeling pretty exciting around ~v3. It was small and easy to learn, felt modern, and had solid interop with ObjC/C++. ...but then absolutely exploded in complexity. New features and syntax thrown in make it feel like C++. 10 ways of doing the same thing. I wish they'd kept the language simple and lean, and wrapped additional complexity as optional packages. It just feels like such a smal…

Which keywords would you get rid of and why? You don't have to use all of them!

I'm not a Swift user, but I can tell you from C++ experience that this logic doesn't mitigate a complex programming language.

* If you're in a team (or reading code in a third-party repo) then you need to know whatever features are used in that code, even if they're not in "your" subset of the language.

* Different codebases using different subsets of the language can feel quite different, which is annoying even if you know all the features used in them.

* Even if you're writing code entirely on your own, you still end up needing to learn about more language features than you need to for your code in order that you can make an informed decision about what goes in "your" subset.

Re: Swift 6.3

#29

Post by troupo »

rasmus1610 wrote: post #16
dzonga wrote: post #13

good to see incredible stuff being shipped in Swift. Haven't used it since v3 though. around 2015-17 - Swift could have easily dethroned Python. it was simple enough - very fast - could plug into the C/C++ ecosystem. Hence all the numeric stuff people were doing in Python powered by C++ libraries could've been done with Swift. the server ecosystem was starting to come to life, even supported by IBM. I think the letdo…

Maybe Chris Lattner leaving and creating Mojo also didn’t help in that regard. Swift for TensorFlow was a cool idea in that time …

Lattner probably left because Apple didn't give the team any breathing room to properly implement the language. It was "we must have this feature yesterday". A lot of Swift is the equivalent of Javascrip's "we have 10 days to implement and ship it":

https://youtu.be/ovYbgbrQ-v8?si=tAko6n88PmpWrzvO&t=1400

--- start quote ---

Swift has turned into a gigantic super complicated bag of special cases, special syntax, special stuff...

We had a ton of users, it had a ton of iternal technical debt... the whole team was behind, and instead of fixing the core, what the team did is they started adding all these special cases.

--- end quote ---

Re: Swift 6.3

#30

Post by oefrha »

dzonga wrote: post #13

good to see incredible stuff being shipped in Swift. Haven't used it since v3 though. around 2015-17 - Swift could have easily dethroned Python. it was simple enough - very fast - could plug into the C/C++ ecosystem. Hence all the numeric stuff people were doing in Python powered by C++ libraries could've been done with Swift. the server ecosystem was starting to come to life, even supported by IBM. I think the letdo…

> Swift could have easily dethroned Python

No way something that compiles as slowly as Swift dethrones Python.

Edit: Plus Swift goes directly against the Zen of Python

> Explicit is better than implicit.

> Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

coupled with shitty LSP support (even to this day) makes code even harder to understand than when you `import *` in Python.

Edit 2: To expand a little on how shitty the LSP support is for those who don't work with Swift: any trivial iOS or macOS project that builds fine in Xcode can have a bunch of SourceKit-LSP (the official Swift LSP) errors because it fails to resolve frameworks/libraries. The only sane way to work with Swift in VS Code or derivatives I've found is to turn off SourceKit diagnostics altogether and only keep swiftc diagnostics. And I have the swift-lsp plugin in Claude Code, there's a routine baseline of SourceKit errors ignored. So you have symbols without explicit namespaces, and the LSP simply can't resolve lots of them, so no lookup for you. Good luck.

Post reply on HN