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Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

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Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#101

Post by mplewis9z »

manmal wrote: post #41
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #38

This will take a while, but I'm looking forward to it. It's probably another big step towards "Swift everywhere," without worrying about bridging to C. I've been doing little but Swift since 2014, and really like the language. I'm still "on the fence" about SwiftUI, but that's mostly because of the level of support from Apple, and the [im] maturity of the system. This will help with that.

Yes, and it means Swift scripts and modules that don’t reference UIKit/AppKit/SwiftUI/Combine will run on Linux and possibly Windows with zero or little modification. I‘m a little sad though that they didn’t start this endeavor years ago, because IMO Rust has already built so much momentum that it will win (for the popular, medium to long term definition of „winning“).

> Yes, and it means Swift scripts and modules that don’t reference UIKit/AppKit/SwiftUI/Combine will run on Linux and possibly Windows with zero or little modification.

This is already pretty much true today, aside from the few, mostly down-in-the-weeds holes in Foundation on Linux that will be solved once this rewrite is complete.

Cross-platform command-line tools, web backends, and things like AWS Lambdas are all possible and pretty easy to do today.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#102

Post by FlyingSnake »

etse wrote: post #39
dcow wrote: post #20

I am pretty certain that most of high level use cases for Rust could be replaced with Swift, with increased developer velocity, if Swift was actually cross platform. And that's coming from a Rust fan. It will be interesting to see how effective this rewrite is.

How would you compare Swift with Kotlin in terms of being a good stand-in for high-level Rust? I've not paid attention to Kotlin in a while, but it seems like there's more progress at supporting Kotlin across more platforms (Kotlin native, web?, etc). I'm curious if people feel that the language features and design are at about parity, or if one is significantly stronger/weaker.

Apart from language syntax similarities, Kotlin and Swift are fundamentally different languages, one runs on a VM (ok there's KNative) and other runs on bare metal.

Kotlin has it's roots in JVM and the early language design choices clearly reflect that. Kotlin/Native will find it very hard to break free of it's JVM counterpart because it can't diverge too much from it to maintain compatibility.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#103

Post by FlyingSnake »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #85
neonsunset wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another scenario where an often missed and underrated choice would be C#. Nowadays it runs everywhere and supports a variety of deployment targets (relying on local runtime, packaging it together into a single somewhat compact binary, natively compiling the code (NativeAOT, it's good but has some limitations) or mixing and matching all of the above). It is also one of the best high-level languages to write performanc…

My experience is probably colored by .NET/WinUI but when I was dabbling in writing a Windows desktop app a few months ago I can't say I loved C#. My background has no Java in it so maybe that's why, but a lot of things that come standard as part of Swift seem to be in external libraries with .NET/C#, and it felt like some things were different for the sake of being different. Point in case, with Swift and Kotlin I've…

> some of these don't have a 1:1 equivalent in C# which was a huge hit to productivity

This is interesting because all these magical functions (zip, map, Rx etc) have roots in LINQ which sprung from .Net world. I find it hard to believe that the battle tested CLR and C# doesn't have the equivalent functions.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#104

Post by rattray »

Someone wrote: post #68
rattray wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you or others on this thread are interested in working on a Swift compiler for Windows, please reach out to me :) a good friend is hiring a team to make this happen.

How will that be different from Apple’s Swift toolchain for Windows ( https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-on-windows/ )?

https://youtu.be/bOMQiMxh5Bc?t=430

relevant listen is about 2min long

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#105

Post by neonsunset »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #85
neonsunset wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another scenario where an often missed and underrated choice would be C#. Nowadays it runs everywhere and supports a variety of deployment targets (relying on local runtime, packaging it together into a single somewhat compact binary, natively compiling the code (NativeAOT, it's good but has some limitations) or mixing and matching all of the above). It is also one of the best high-level languages to write performanc…

My experience is probably colored by .NET/WinUI but when I was dabbling in writing a Windows desktop app a few months ago I can't say I loved C#. My background has no Java in it so maybe that's why, but a lot of things that come standard as part of Swift seem to be in external libraries with .NET/C#, and it felt like some things were different for the sake of being different. Point in case, with Swift and Kotlin I've…

All these are part of standard library. Map is Select, Filter is Where, Reduce is Aggregate, etc. You can write C# in a functional style easily, it is one of the premiere features.

UI frameworks on the other hand…I feel your pain.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#106

Post by kitsunesoba »

neonsunset wrote: post #105
kitsunesoba wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is probably colored by .NET/WinUI but when I was dabbling in writing a Windows desktop app a few months ago I can't say I loved C#. My background has no Java in it so maybe that's why, but a lot of things that come standard as part of Swift seem to be in external libraries with .NET/C#, and it felt like some things were different for the sake of being different. Point in case, with Swift and Kotlin I've…

All these are part of standard library. Map is Select, Filter is Where, Reduce is Aggregate, etc. You can write C# in a functional style easily, it is one of the premiere features. UI frameworks on the other hand…I feel your pain.

I did find and use Select and Where at least, but I recall running into caveats with them or with their interactions with other parts of the language that meant that they couldn't be used identically. I don't remember specifically what it was since it's been a while but I remember it being frustrating. I should probably find a cheat sheet of equivalents if I try writing it again.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#107

Post by rattray »

dcow wrote: post #70
rattray wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Asking as someone who's never programmed with Swift or Rust, but is familiar with the syntax/ideas of each, I'm curious why you say that?

If you don't care about performance and "zero cost abstractions" and are more interested in Rust for its memory safety, then most of your Rust programs end up with a lot of syntactic and library bloat to add those "costly" (but convenient) abstractions back in, like explicitly cloning or wrapping types in Rc and Arc or just always taking ownership of borrowed data by constructing owned types with it. And then there a…

Makes sense, thank you for explaining!

Personally I'd love to see a forked flavor of TypeScript with static compilation and multithreading (which implies a lot more immutability, etc). Maybe I should give Swift a try…

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#108

Post by [deleted] »

pkulak wrote: post #58
dcow wrote: post #20

I am pretty certain that most of high level use cases for Rust could be replaced with Swift, with increased developer velocity, if Swift was actually cross platform. And that's coming from a Rust fan. It will be interesting to see how effective this rewrite is.

I don't know if you can write high-throughput systems with 100% reference counted GC. Swift is targeted at UI work pretty hard.

[deleted]

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#109

Post by [deleted] »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #49
manmal wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and it means Swift scripts and modules that don’t reference UIKit/AppKit/SwiftUI/Combine will run on Linux and possibly Windows with zero or little modification. I‘m a little sad though that they didn’t start this endeavor years ago, because IMO Rust has already built so much momentum that it will win (for the popular, medium to long term definition of „winning“).

I don't particularly care, whether or not Swift ever leaves the Apple ecosystem (like ObjC). In that domain, Rust will never "win." I think that Rust is an awesome server language, though, and I'm glad to see it gain traction. I just hope that it doesn't get trashed by a bunch of junk dependencies, written in it. I find using apps written, using hybrid systems, or PWAs, to be quite painful (on Apple devices -and that…

[deleted]

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#110

Post by danielvaughn »

bfrog wrote: post #89

So apple seems to be dropping c like languages, Microsoft says new stuff should not be written in c like languages anymore, and google has steadily worked towards using rust and go in place of c and c++ where it makes sense to do so it seems. There seems to be a trend here.

Forgive me, is swift not in the c family? I could have sworn that it was, but I'm not overly familiar with it.
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