The Swift Programming Language • Hacker News Board

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#531

Post by bsaul » Mon, Jun 02, 2014, 9:13 PM UTC

y14 wrote: post #375

Automatic Reference Counting Swift uses Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) to track and manage your app’s memory usage. In most cases, this means that memory management “just works” in Swift, and you do not need to think about memory management yourself. ARC automatically frees up the memory used by class instances when those instances are no longer needed.” Excerpt From: Apple Inc. “The Swift Programming Language.”…

It "automatically" works until it doesn't. Pointer semantic is the first thing i've looked, and unsurprisingly, they still have the "weak / strong" pointer semantic.

You can still point to nil pointers and crash the program because of it, and you can still have retain cycles which creates memory leaks.

That language really looks more of trying to make good compromise rather than create a revolution or a breakthrough. In a way, that feels like a much safer choice.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#532

Post by sixbrx » Mon, Jun 02, 2014, 9:15 PM UTC

wtracy wrote: post #497

xenadu02 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heartbleed. Majority of all SSL keys on the internet compromised. All ~2 billion of humans on the internet required to change their passwords due to a single mistake by a single programmer using C. That's billions of human beings wasting hours either changing all their passwords or having their money, identities, medical records, and more stolen because they didn't. Having their accounts hijacked. For all we know tot…

It is unethical to continue writing code in non-memory-safe C or C-based languages, for any purpose. Period. I'm looking forward to seeing your new operating system and managed runtime written entirely using garbage-collected languages!

Parent poster didn't imply that the replacement would be garbage collected, just memory safe, which is a pretty big difference. I think you will see it sooner than you may think, it seems the tide may be turning.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#533

Post by mantrax5 » Mon, Jun 02, 2014, 9:15 PM UTC

georgewfraser wrote: post #523

You appear to be advocating a new: [ ] functional [X] imperative [X] object-oriented [X] procedural [X] stack-based [ ] "multi-paradigm" [ ] lazy [ ] eager [X] statically-typed [ ] dynamically-typed [ ] pure [X] impure [ ] non-hygienic [ ] visual [ ] beginner-friendly [ ] non-programmer-friendly [ ] completely incomprehensible programming language. Your language will not work. Here is why it will not work. You appear…

While half of the things you checked in that copy-paste are wrong, let me take the bait and say why it will work:

- it's not just an arbitrary language, it's the new officially sanctioned programming interface for Apple's gigantic, wildly profitable ecosystem

- it's much more concise than Objective-C

- it's faster than Objective-C

- it's safer than Objective-C

- it has more features than Objective-C

- ...yet it's fully compatible with Objective-C and C code running alongside in the same app.

And last, but not least, if you know how Apple works, you know that somewhere in the range of WWDC 2016-2018, Craig Federighi will be on stage, showing a pie chart and saying "Over 92% of developers have ported their apps to Swift, so screw the other 8%, we're discontinuing Objective-C".

Moving fast and constant change is the name of the game at Apple.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#534

Post by maaaats » Mon, Jun 02, 2014, 9:16 PM UTC

binarycrusader wrote: post #400

maaaats wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extremely closed, at least at the moment. Can't even read the language reference without Apple products.

You can actually read the language reference with a "standard browser": https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...

Doesn't change pages when I click on stuff here.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#535

Post by zwieback » Mon, Jun 02, 2014, 9:17 PM UTC

I like the "value binding" for switch statements with tuples.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#536

Post by bsaul » Mon, Jun 02, 2014, 9:17 PM UTC

One question to the audience : i've had a look at the swift iBook and noticed that dictionary are strongly typed. Which is great in a way, but now i wonder :

how would you create a json deserializer ( which conveniently deserialized into NSArray and NSDictionnary of anything ) ? I didn't see any "object" or "id" type equivalent.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#537

Post by platz » Mon, Jun 02, 2014, 9:17 PM UTC

georgewfraser wrote: post #523

You appear to be advocating a new: [ ] functional [X] imperative [X] object-oriented [X] procedural [X] stack-based [ ] "multi-paradigm" [ ] lazy [ ] eager [X] statically-typed [ ] dynamically-typed [ ] pure [X] impure [ ] non-hygienic [ ] visual [ ] beginner-friendly [ ] non-programmer-friendly [ ] completely incomprehensible programming language. Your language will not work. Here is why it will not work. You appear…

source: http://colinm.org/language_checklist.html

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#538

Post by hatred » Mon, Jun 02, 2014, 9:18 PM UTC

unfunco wrote: post #321

aneisf wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do this in C# (and presumably other languages). I've seen people using Greek symbols in mathy code before. It's kind of fun.

It's fun once. It's impractical for someone editing the code later though, I don't want to have to look up the unicode character each time I want to remember it, and I don't want to have to copy and paste it either, it's better to stick with the characters available on a keyboard.

I won't mind it if the original author also has a comment signifying what unicode character the variable refers to. This will reduce some pain though not all of it.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#539

Post by binarycrusader » Mon, Jun 02, 2014, 9:18 PM UTC

Ph0X wrote: post #428

binarycrusader wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually read the language reference with a "standard browser": https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...

Hmm, can't seem to change page in Chrome. In Firefox, it works slightly better but still doesn't really. I'm guessing it only works on Safari? How can they release a language and not have proper documentation that is accessible by anyone? It'd be great if someone could get the book, convert it to PDF and post it online.

Works fine here in FireFox 29.0 on Solaris no less.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#540

Post by chc » Mon, Jun 02, 2014, 9:18 PM UTC

There's one thing that bothers me about Swift, and I feel like I must not be getting it. For the most part it looks like a very well-designed language, and the choices they made are extremely pragmatic. But the way collection mutability is determined seems positively insane. You can't have a mutable reference to an immutable array, or vice-versa. I don't get the reasoning behind that.