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

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

infoq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 402 posts

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

#151

Post by mplewis9z »

alberth wrote: post #117
saagarjha wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of them. Very few frameworks are actually written primarily in Swift.

Would the macOS kernel (Mach) ever be rewritten in Swift? And if so, what benefit would it provide?

I doubt the entire kernel would - there are low-level, memory-unsafe operations that an operating system performs that Swift _could_ do, but it would be fighting the design of the language and likely not a great trade-off for the kernel developers.

But pieces absolutely could be. The benefit would be compile-time checking for memory safety issues (reducing crashes) and language-level concurrency (fewer race conditions and a much easier path to parallelize single-threaded code for performance).

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

#153

Post by dochtman »

manmal wrote: post #147
password1 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think Swift and Rust are competing on the same grounds or for the same objective? Genuinely curious, i don't know much about Rust.

I watched a Rust intro video recently that provided a perspective I liked, so I’ll share that here: MS, Apple, Google (and more) all relied heavily on C for low level code that needed to be as performant as possible. It turned out though that C‘s memory management is so problematic that many/most security issues are caused by it. To address that, Google invented Go, Apple made Swift, Mozilla gave us Rust etc. MS is i…

Note that Apple is known er use Rust for some of its infrastructure and Google is adopting Rust in a big way in Android and Fuchsia.

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

#154

Post by brundolf »

smoldesu wrote: post #122
w10-1 wrote: post #112

Correction: rewrite of PARTS of Foundation There already was an open-source project to rewrite ALL of foundation, but it had stalled on the shores of having to re-implement everything: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation The news is actually that Apple is now instead trying to define the bits/parts to support via Swift on all platforms (the original API's will always be supported on Darwin). The announ…

It simply sounds like there isn't much demand for Swift from the Open Source community. Apple certainly makes a big push for it internally, but outside their platform, Swift doesn't have much momentum. If Apple wants people to use Swift like a first-class runtime, they should stop treating third-parties like second-class citizens. They have $200 billion dollars in cold, hard cash - surely some of it could go towards…

I don't think there's a binary between "totally open, general-purpose language across all platforms" and "closed-source/proprietary". Even if Swift remains a decidedly Apple language, developers can still benefit from having access to source code and to an open discussion/planning forum. Unreal Engine takes a similar approach

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

#156

Post by Gigachad »

smoldesu wrote: post #124
Gigachad wrote: post #121

The removal of C from Android and iOS is going to pay off massively. The current state of things where every government is sitting on an endless collection of exploits is not ideal.

Considering that both Google and Apple are cardholding members of PRISM, it sounds like a bit of a frying pan vs fire situation to me.

Its still fewer backdoors and more controlled.

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

#157

Post by smoldesu »

Gigachad wrote: post #156
smoldesu wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that both Google and Apple are cardholding members of PRISM, it sounds like a bit of a frying pan vs fire situation to me.

Its still fewer backdoors and more controlled.

More controlled by who?

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

#158

Post by thrwawy74 »

Is there anything genuinely innovative about Swift or is it just another "cross-platform scripting language" that I'll only see on 1 platform?

The only reason I learned Powershell is because I have to admin for Windows. At least Powershell is interesting for its pipeline and object handling. I get not one spark of joy from Swift, and the comments I see are "at least we're not writing C anymore". Stockholm syndrome.

Sorry this is so negative, but I can't get excited about $NewLanguage unless I know it offers real benefit. I have drunk the Rust koolaid, and for very good reasons. What am I missing in Swift?

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

#159

Post by nolimitsky »

thrwawy74 wrote: post #158

Is there anything genuinely innovative about Swift or is it just another "cross-platform scripting language" that I'll only see on 1 platform? The only reason I learned Powershell is because I have to admin for Windows. At least Powershell is interesting for its pipeline and object handling. I get not one spark of joy from Swift, and the comments I see are "at least we're not writing C anymore". Stockholm syndrome. S…

[flagged]

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

#160

Post by [deleted] »

thrwawy74 wrote: post #158

Is there anything genuinely innovative about Swift or is it just another "cross-platform scripting language" that I'll only see on 1 platform? The only reason I learned Powershell is because I have to admin for Windows. At least Powershell is interesting for its pipeline and object handling. I get not one spark of joy from Swift, and the comments I see are "at least we're not writing C anymore". Stockholm syndrome. S…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN