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Integrating Zig and SwiftUI

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Re: Integrating Zig and SwiftUI

#21

Post by dhab »

bestinterest wrote: post #19

Noob question, What makes languages like Zig, Rust, C and C++ the best fit for cross platform applications over many garbage collected languages? Why is bringing the language runtime a problem? What does it mean to compile to a C-compatible library? EDIT: I decided to ChatGPT my question instead. https://chat.openai.com/share/9a5f9f7a-0f5d-4cf6-95fc-4e0ec9...

Curious to know from experts in the above to see if ChatGPTs response is valid? Me as someone who knows nothing about either, looking at a nuanced response from ChatGPT, puts me at awe - esp. response to the question: "Say I called a bunch of goroutines when I was in the Add function of the example you gave, would this be a problem?"

Re: Integrating Zig and SwiftUI

#22

Post by [deleted] »

dhab wrote: post #21
bestinterest wrote: post #19

Noob question, What makes languages like Zig, Rust, C and C++ the best fit for cross platform applications over many garbage collected languages? Why is bringing the language runtime a problem? What does it mean to compile to a C-compatible library? EDIT: I decided to ChatGPT my question instead. https://chat.openai.com/share/9a5f9f7a-0f5d-4cf6-95fc-4e0ec9...

Curious to know from experts in the above to see if ChatGPTs response is valid? Me as someone who knows nothing about either, looking at a nuanced response from ChatGPT, puts me at awe - esp. response to the question: "Say I called a bunch of goroutines when I was in the Add function of the example you gave, would this be a problem?"

[deleted]

Re: Integrating Zig and SwiftUI

#23

Post by felipefar »

Nice post!

I'm not sure if the same result is applicable to most software projects. A console emulator doesn't need several types of GUI objects, while most other projects need to display and handle input for several different types of data.

In most projects I've worked on, the proportion of GUI code to business code was different: I saw apprx. 70% GUI code to 30% business code.

So a cross platform GUI layer saves a lot more development time.

Re: Integrating Zig and SwiftUI

#24

Post by alecthomas »

bestinterest wrote: post #19

Noob question, What makes languages like Zig, Rust, C and C++ the best fit for cross platform applications over many garbage collected languages? Why is bringing the language runtime a problem? What does it mean to compile to a C-compatible library? EDIT: I decided to ChatGPT my question instead. https://chat.openai.com/share/9a5f9f7a-0f5d-4cf6-95fc-4e0ec9...

ChatGPT's responses start accurate then quickly go off the rails. The section from this point onwards is completely incorrect:

> Say I called a bunch of goroutines when I was in the Add function of the example you gave, would this be a problem?

The Go runtime is initialised once only in c-shared mode for the lifetime of the application - it would make no sense to do it on every function invocation, and be incredibly slow. So the answer to this section and the next one are just largely bogus.

ie. this response

> However, once you call a function via a C or Swift bridge, it becomes a synchronous operation and will block the calling thread until all goroutines have completed execution. Therefore, you would need to effectively manage the synchronization of these goroutines to avoid unnecessary blocking of the calling thread.

And the response to this question:

> You said in 4 the Go runtime may not keep running, does this mean that every invocation of the Add function has to spin up the whole Go runtime every time? Why cant it just stay alive inside the Swift process?

Are completely incorrect.

Re: Integrating Zig and SwiftUI

#25

Post by alecthomas »

dhab wrote: post #21
bestinterest wrote: post #19

Noob question, What makes languages like Zig, Rust, C and C++ the best fit for cross platform applications over many garbage collected languages? Why is bringing the language runtime a problem? What does it mean to compile to a C-compatible library? EDIT: I decided to ChatGPT my question instead. https://chat.openai.com/share/9a5f9f7a-0f5d-4cf6-95fc-4e0ec9...

Curious to know from experts in the above to see if ChatGPTs response is valid? Me as someone who knows nothing about either, looking at a nuanced response from ChatGPT, puts me at awe - esp. response to the question: "Say I called a bunch of goroutines when I was in the Add function of the example you gave, would this be a problem?"

As I responded in a sibling comment, this is the point where ChatGPT goes completely off the rails and starts fabricating responses. Temper your awe :)

Re: Integrating Zig and SwiftUI

#26

Post by Thaxll »

bestinterest wrote: post #19

Noob question, What makes languages like Zig, Rust, C and C++ the best fit for cross platform applications over many garbage collected languages? Why is bringing the language runtime a problem? What does it mean to compile to a C-compatible library? EDIT: I decided to ChatGPT my question instead. https://chat.openai.com/share/9a5f9f7a-0f5d-4cf6-95fc-4e0ec9...

It's about the libraries usually, ui lib are all made in c/c++ and those "natives" langage have better integration with it ( ffi ).

For example calling C from Go is doable, but it's not encouraged and sometime a bit slow.

On the other hand Go and Java are trully multi platform and it's well supported and usually easier to do than other native langages.

Re: Integrating Zig and SwiftUI

#27

Post by filleduchaos »

felipefar wrote: post #23

Nice post! I'm not sure if the same result is applicable to most software projects. A console emulator doesn't need several types of GUI objects, while most other projects need to display and handle input for several different types of data. In most projects I've worked on, the proportion of GUI code to business code was different: I saw apprx. 70% GUI code to 30% business code. So a cross platform GUI layer saves a…

Is 70% of the code actually GUI code, or is it business-and-platform-logic-coupled-to-GUI code?

Re: Integrating Zig and SwiftUI

#28

Post by aidenn0 »

bestinterest wrote: post #19

Noob question, What makes languages like Zig, Rust, C and C++ the best fit for cross platform applications over many garbage collected languages? Why is bringing the language runtime a problem? What does it mean to compile to a C-compatible library? EDIT: I decided to ChatGPT my question instead. https://chat.openai.com/share/9a5f9f7a-0f5d-4cf6-95fc-4e0ec9...

Pretty much every modern language (Zig, Rust, C, and C++ included) depends on a runtime. The C runtime is privileged because it is already present on all 3 desktop OSes.

It is also a lot smaller than most other runtimes, which makes bundling the C runtime with the program more palatable.

A "C-compatible library" is a library (i.e. a collection of functions) that is callable in the same way that functions written in C are called. Nearly all non-C languages provide a way to call C functions (because, again on all modern desktop OSes, the operating-system interface is written in C).

If everyone wrote OS interfaces in perl, then you would want to compile to a perl-compatible library. If the Lisp machines had won, then you would be compiling to a Common Lisp compatible library.

Re: Integrating Zig and SwiftUI

#29

Post by benatkin »

deergomoo wrote: post #18
wudangmonk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React native and all these similar DSLs always seemed like a bad idea to me. I can forgive it on the web as you have no other choice than to use the 3 broken pillars which is html, css, and js and build your sand castles on top of that. I wonder though, was the development of swift UI influenced by the abundance of react developers or is this what peak UI development looks like?. In the history of GUI applications do…

The main benefit of declarative UI frameworks is that they remove the need to manually reconcile changes in state with changes in the representation of that state (with the caveat that it often becomes difficult to do so if the DSL doesn’t cover the behaviour you want). UIs inherently have a hell of a lot of state that is constantly in flux, so it can become very difficult to manage those transitions correctly and ef…

DSL stands for Domain Specific Language, not declarative. It is possible to be declarative without a hybrid DSL like JSX. Angular is declarative, but it doesn't mix html structures and js in the same way.

Re: Integrating Zig and SwiftUI

#30

Post by dgellow »

IMHO that’s one of the main benefits of following the Model-View-ViewModel architecture pattern for GUIs. You can have all the models and viewmodels defined in a platform agnostic library, and your views are the only thing to implement in a platform specific way. The core library can be implemented in any language, you just need a way to call methods and setters when the user interacts, and handle update events to update the UI.
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