Swift 3.0 Released • Hacker News Board

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#21

Post by steveklabnik » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 10:11 AM UTC

K0nserv wrote: post #18

valarauca1 wrote: post #13

So is 3.0 when Swift is finally gonna settle into stability? Or are they gonna wait until 4.0 to stop breaking backwards compatibility?

AFAIK Swift is going to be source compatible going forward(don't quote me on that), but ABI stability is not going to be there until 4.0. EDIT: See steveklabnik's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12495200

I have a link that says exactly this posted downthread.

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#22

Post by hellofunk » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 10:34 AM UTC

andrewvijay wrote: post #15

BREAKING again? Demotivating a lot.

We should all be so lucky that some other languages are willing to break backwards compatibility. Even C++ gurus like Scott Myers advocate that language finally breaking source compatibility [0]. Often, breaking compatibility is the only way to make a language better.

[0] http://scottmeyers.blogspot.nl/2015/11/breaking-all-eggs-in-...

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#23

Post by thomasahle » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 10:42 AM UTC

Wow, they've basically renamed the entire Standard Library, see the changeset: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/proposa...

Not that I mind though. This kind of thing should be easy to auto refactor.

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#24

Post by nicky0 » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 10:56 AM UTC

I look forward to using Swift in a couple of years when it is all stable. It looks great. Thanks to those of you using it now and contributing to its improvement.

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#25

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 11:01 AM UTC

andrewvijay wrote: post #15

BREAKING again? Demotivating a lot.

Swift is a young language. That it breaks some things now means we won't be stuck with its early mistakes forever in ten years.

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#26

Post by fit2rule » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 11:04 AM UTC

Holding off on learning much more Swift for now, until things stabilize and stuff stops breaking. Its not much fun to go back to learn some Swift only to discover things have changed since last time ..

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#27

Post by jug » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 11:09 AM UTC

valarauca1 wrote: post #13

So is 3.0 when Swift is finally gonna settle into stability? Or are they gonna wait until 4.0 to stop breaking backwards compatibility?

Yes, at least that seems like the plan. Take the pain now in order to get it stable.

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#28

Post by rimantas » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 11:25 AM UTC

nicky0 wrote: post #24

I look forward to using Swift in a couple of years when it is all stable. It looks great. Thanks to those of you using it now and contributing to its improvement.

Swift 4 is supposed to be source compatible with Swift 3, so no need to wait.

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#29

Post by melling » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 11:49 AM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #20

insulanian wrote: post #2

> It is not source-compatible with Swift 2.2 and 2.3. This created havoc in Python. Hopefully it won't happen here.

> This created havoc in Python. Hopefully it won't happen here. There are big differences though: * Python had 15 years of source-compatibility before the switch, Swift has 1 year and a history of source-incompatibility (Swift 2 was not source-compatible with Swift 1) * Python had a fair amount of semantic-incompatibility * Python doesn't have a (heavy) compiler backing it up making source and semantic incompatibilit…

It won't happen because Apple won't give you the option.

Swift 3.x has a large amount of syntax changes. The compiler helps with the refactoring but it's still work.

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#30

Post by groue » Wed, Sep 14, 2016, 12:01 PM UTC

yoz-y wrote: post #3

insulanian wrote: post #2

> It is not source-compatible with Swift 2.2 and 2.3. This created havoc in Python. Hopefully it won't happen here.

Until now Swift has not promised source compatibility so the developers should be ready to rewrite their code for new versions. I would not be surprised if Swift 2.3 support were dropped in the next version of XCode completely. The migration tools are quite good though so going from 2.2 to 3.0 directly should not be much of a problem. I think that in Python the problem was/is that the 2.x was already a massively used…

External librairies can also support the migration by providing "fix-its" which helps the compiler display an helpful message whenever a Swift 2-era line has not been updated to Swift 3 (see for example this PR: https://github.com/groue/GRDB.swift/pull/114)