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Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

swift.org

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Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#141

Post by myko »

uhura wrote: post #36

I believe that this long game of Swift being "good for everything" but "better for Apple platforms" will be detrimental to the language. This does not help the language nor seems to bring more people to the ecosystem. Competitors seems to have a combination of: - Being more open-source - Have more contributors - Have a narrower scope Maybe they should consider open sourcing all the tooling (like Xcode) otherwise the…

Simply open sourcing major frameworks like SwiftUI would go a long way to making it usable

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#142

Post by myko »

GeekyBear wrote: post #116
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my experience for a long time. Swift is nice but why would I waste my time working on a language that is too tied to the Apple platform even if it's open-source when we have more universal scripting languages like Python, or languages like Kotlin that are compiled but have more support (because I trust JetBrains way more than Apple at the moment), or languages that are most strict like Rust but have mor…

> languages that are most strict like Rust but have more momentum and safety? Like Rust, Swift is a compiled language that offers memory safety by default. The creator of Clang and LLVM also created Swift, and interoperability with C was an explicit design goal. So Swift offers the memory safety and data race safety of Rust, in a compiled language, without giving up tight integration with C. (To be fair, better C int…

fwiw Swift still doesn't support mixed-language targets so the interop is somewhat less useful to me than I'd like: https://forums.swift.org/t/se-0403-package-manager-mixed-lan...

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#143

Post by cosmic_cheese »

desiderantes wrote: post #126
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can only speak for myself, but I’d love to be able to use Swift elsewhere so I don’t need to drag around a JVM and all the things that come with it (Kotlin) or have to wrestle with Rust’s sematics and disinclination towards old style imperative desktop UI development. Swift isn't perfect of course, but it’s the closest I’ve come to a language feeling “comfy”.

So you haven't heard of Kotlin Multiplatform.

Have heard of it, haven’t investigated it deeply. Looks to still have some of the less-great points of the Java ecosystem on the build side of things (gradle) which is a detractor for me.

Kotlin’s syntax is also weird/quirky in some ways.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#145

Post by threeseed »

kelnos wrote: post #92
threeseed wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd first have to buy a new Mac for that Which means you are running Mojave and your Mac is at least 6 years old. I wouldn't expect anyone to support developers who are running a two generation old OS.

I can run the latest version of my OS of choice on hardware twice that old. This is only a problem that Apple has created to help them sell hardware. These days, a 6-year-old laptop is still a perfectly capable machine.

And it is still a perfectly capable machine.

But you can't expect Apple to support it as a development platform. Especially when they want you to use the latest SDKs which only work on newer machines.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#146

Post by fcantournet »

philistine wrote: post #133
YmiYugy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac OS does some amazing things for security. An immutable root OS, sandboxing, very user friendly disk encryption. But there are certainly decisions that hold back the platform. Their business decisions have driven most developers away from the App Store. There is a notarization process, but it imposes a burden that many small open source projects can not bear. They don't have an easy way to run untrusted software i…

> Their business decisions have driven most developers away from the App Store. > They don't have an easy way to run untrusted software in a containerized way (compare Fedora toolbox). The App Store is the way to run untrusted apps in a containerized way.

It's "the way" that apple wanted it to be, but it's not the way that humans have chosen.

Typically not a great idea to be against humans, especially the ones that give you money.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#147

Post by rescripting »

jitl wrote: post #136
rescripting wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What don’t you like about the VSCode plugin?

For me it just spins forever and never manages to do any LSP things

If you haven’t tried recently I’d give it another go. A lot of work has gone in to the LSP this past year to stabilize it and improve performance.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#148

Post by AlotOfReading »

o11c wrote: post #129
AlotOfReading wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both GCC and Clang have shipped support for major updates to C and C++ within the last 3 years. If C and C++ aren't stable enough, what is?

And is there any actual need to use those right now? No. I lived through the C++11 transition (which was the only actually significant improvement C++ has ever had), and as much as GCC 4.6 was enticing, it really wasn't a burden to keep supporting GCC 4.4 in stable software. Only for ground-breaking development (which takes long enough to stabilize that stable distros will have the new GCC) is it worth starting to us…

I just picked a random, notable feature (std::format) and the LTS my systems are currently on (22.04). The current Clang in universe is 14, which doesn't have a complete std::format implementation. That's one of the most popular features from a 5 year old language standard that many people are using today and yet it's still not available on a common LTS version without adding the LLVM repos.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#149

Post by jitl »

uhura wrote: post #36

I believe that this long game of Swift being "good for everything" but "better for Apple platforms" will be detrimental to the language. This does not help the language nor seems to bring more people to the ecosystem. Competitors seems to have a combination of: - Being more open-source - Have more contributors - Have a narrower scope Maybe they should consider open sourcing all the tooling (like Xcode) otherwise the…

I don't get this reaction.

Apple: here, we're open-sourcing this previously closed-source Apple-specific thing that made Swift better on Apple platforms. We're moving the Apple stuff into a plugin so Windows and Linux can be equal peers to Apple in the new system. We've implemented preliminary support for Windows & Linux and plan to continue work to bring them up to parity.

Hacker News: I believe that this long game of Swift being "good for everything" but "better for Apple platforms" will be detrimental to the language. This does not help the language nor seems to bring more people to the ecosystem.

Like, what more do you want from them? For them to only open-source Swift Build once they've fully implemented complete parity for Windows and Linux? In the years you'd be waiting for full parity, we'd still see this same kind of comment on every story about swift, asking when they're going to open source a production-level build system.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#150

Post by makeitdouble »

thih9 wrote: post #62
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my experience for a long time. Swift is nice but why would I waste my time working on a language that is too tied to the Apple platform even if it's open-source when we have more universal scripting languages like Python, or languages like Kotlin that are compiled but have more support (because I trust JetBrains way more than Apple at the moment), or languages that are most strict like Rust but have mor…

> why would I waste my time working on a language that is too tied to the Apple platform This might work the other way round: starting from people familiar with macos or ios development who want to write for other platforms. Then the question becomes: why would a developer learn a different open source language when they can use what they already know. And sure, depending on the context they might still go with Pytho…

That crowd has the disadvantage of not being primarily interested in the other platforms, so they won't be much invested in optimizing or better matching the target capabilities.

That's the same dynamic as web devs writing React Native apps: you won't expect them to contribute extensions that manipulate local apfs metadata for instance.

So while it's nice to have them use the tools, you still need people who primarily care for non Apple platform and embrance swift for their purpose to have it expand.

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