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Inside Swift

eswick.com

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Re: Inside Swift

#12

Post by NamTaf »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #8
tendom wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm new to HN, but are you new to the internet? Saurik knows a few things about iOS, google him.

Grandparent was probably out of line (saurik's comment provided useful information that went beyond me too-ism), but I can understand why one would be wary. Its hard to keep up with who is legit, and there has been a lot of me tooism lately. At least no one has started writing any horrible books on Swift yet.

Oh they almost certainly have, they're just not finished and published yet :)

Re: Inside Swift

#13

Post by eswick »

gilgoomesh wrote: post #10
agentcoops wrote: post #6

"Swift is Apple’s new programming language, said by many to ‘replace’ Objective-C. This is not the case. I’ve spent some time reverse engineering Swift binaries and the runtime, and I’ve found out quite a bit about it." Correct me if I'm wrong (and my point certainly isn't meant to detract from the interest of looking more in-depth at Swift internals), but this article doesn't appear to support this claim at all. It…

Yeah, the article's technical analysis is good but I'm not sure what this line was supposed to say: what it actually says is wrong. Swift is definitely intended to replace Objective-C. Perhaps that line in article meant that it's not binary identical to Objective-C. Swift classes definitely use different method invocation semantics (unless you adorn the class with the @objc attribute).

What I meant by that was, the Objective-C runtime is still needed.

Re: Inside Swift

#15

Post by pjmlp »

eswick wrote: post #13
gilgoomesh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the article's technical analysis is good but I'm not sure what this line was supposed to say: what it actually says is wrong. Swift is definitely intended to replace Objective-C. Perhaps that line in article meant that it's not binary identical to Objective-C. Swift classes definitely use different method invocation semantics (unless you adorn the class with the @objc attribute).

What I meant by that was, the Objective-C runtime is still needed.

Sure, because Apple wants a transition path for existing code.

The Objective-C runtime takes the role of COM in Mac OS X/iOS.

A binary ABI between OO languages.

Re: Inside Swift

#16

Post by saurik »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #8
tendom wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm new to HN, but are you new to the internet? Saurik knows a few things about iOS, google him.

Grandparent was probably out of line (saurik's comment provided useful information that went beyond me too-ism), but I can understand why one would be wary. Its hard to keep up with who is legit, and there has been a lot of me tooism lately. At least no one has started writing any horrible books on Swift yet.

I am not certain I understand the problem with "me too-ism". Hacker News is a discussion forum: if I go into the comments on a post, what I am expecting to find is more information about the topic written by other people... if someone links to a related project or an article with more detail, I don't see how that's a problem.

In this case, I am actually featured prominently in this article--it isn't just that I know a lot about iOS or about Swift, but as the second half of this article and arguably the whole reason it was written was to show how to use Substrate (something I wrote) with Swift, I think it would be difficult to claim anything I say on the matter is "me too"--but even if it were someone totally random, I don't see why it should ever be considered a bad thing to direct people to more information :(.

(FWIW, I actually don't consider this article entirely correct: the information here implies that the symbols are available for all functions, and that was not my experience while on stage disassembling the WWDC app. I think I may need to parse the embedded Swift modules and provide new APIs for developers to look up methods out of the vtable, but before I go too crazy with that I am interested to see where the Swift-provided Swift.reflect ends up going.)

Re: Inside Swift

#17

Post by micampe »

msoad wrote: post #7

If you have Xcode 6 installed this is the binary to actual Swift REPL: /Applications/Xcode6-Beta.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/bin/swift Also try :gui command inside the REPL

Don't run the binary directly, that path will change when the GM ships. Use:

    xcrun swift

Re: Inside Swift

#19

Post by coldtea »

_Zach wrote: post #4
saurik wrote: post #2

I also covered some of this (in fact, last I saw this article, much more than is here, but I can't see the article right now because it is just saying there is a database error) in my talk at AltConf (during WWDC), where I used Hopper and Cycript (my Objective-C/JavaScript hybrid debug REPL) to demonstrate the layout of a Swift object (as well as taking some questions afterwards from the audience). https://www.youtub…

All the 'I also _____' and 'me too me too!!!' comments are so distasteful.

"Me too"-ism? Are tutorials and articles on a new language only supposed to be written by one single person?

Or should any other who has written related material not inform HN, because someone other's articles were posted first?

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