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Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

swift.org

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Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#201

Post by easeout »

fastball wrote: post #196
easeout wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, they ship a solid VS Code extension and LSP. Their swift-testing package is the new open source and cross-platform successor to XCTest. The same can be said of swift-foundation as compared to Foundation. The path they've chosen is not to open source Xcode, but to move the things Swift needs on all platforms to the Swift language project and common implementations. Personally I think the main prob…

Are there any LLVM langs that have fast compile times? I think that just kinda comes with the territory of having that IR step + all the optimizations that happen at compile time to help runtime performance.

That's a good point. I had in mind that there's some regret about the combination of type inference with type-based overloads, due to the search expense it adds to what ought to be straightforward parsing of long expressions.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#202

Post by fastball »

easeout wrote: post #201
fastball wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any LLVM langs that have fast compile times? I think that just kinda comes with the territory of having that IR step + all the optimizations that happen at compile time to help runtime performance.

That's a good point. I had in mind that there's some regret about the combination of type inference with type-based overloads, due to the search expense it adds to what ought to be straightforward parsing of long expressions.

Yeah, I think there are definitely parts of the language design / language features that are going to contribute, but when you need to parse to IR and then compile that to machine code, it seems any features you add that are nice for the developer are going to doubly hurt compile times. You see the same with ARC in swift (or the borrow checker in Rust).

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#203

Post by talldayo »

MBCook wrote: post #189
talldayo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like, what more do you want from them? You know what we want from them. If Apple wants to be accepted by the Open Source community, they can't reprise the Microsoft playbook with a smug "Think Different" twist. This is basically a beat-for-beat rerun of the C#/Dotnet situation with a different font and Corinthian leather. The internet at-large is sick and tired of tending to Apple's scraps at their obscure whims. I…

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The perfect way to draw companies to embrace open source.

They don't embrace Open Source, that's the problem. I don't even have to invoke the Halloween Documents to erode faith in FAANG as an Open Source steward, half this thread retched at the idea of using Swift out of principle.

Apple is welcome to head down the same road they're going if they think it's working out for Swift. Developers aren't going to magically warm to it any more than they trusted C# unless Apple makes some unprecedented change in their attitude towards Open Source. The world doesn't owe them shit.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#204

Post by TheNightman »

easeout wrote: post #200
bluepizza wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Core libs and foundation for starters? https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/

This, right? https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-foundation

Yeah I jumped into swift on Linux a while back having mostly used it on apple platforms and I couldn’t even tell anything was different. A few years ago I would’ve had to struggle with SwiftNIO but not nowadays. URLSession, Codable, etc. all there on Linux (not sure about Combine but Combine is stupid in the Swift 6 world IMO. Swift concurrency is better in almost every way).

Swift on Linux (except NixOS) is actually very good nowadays. There’s even a libadwaita library that feels a LOT like writing SwiftUI.

Feels like a lot of folks were turned off early on, found something else, and never bothered to try again (which is fair).

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#205

Post by technol0gic »

gruuuk wrote: post #157
jitl wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They should have been fully open source with full linux support and parity since day one. That would actually help the language get traction. At this point it's a dying language.

trolling for reactions is trite and predictable

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#206

Post by isodev »

easeout wrote: post #179
bluepizza wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this reaction. Almost every language in the world: here's the spec, the tooling, and everything you need to use, master, and expand this language. Please use it. Apple: sorry, Mac only. Like, I want Apple to do the bare minimum that everyone else is doing.

Swift announced Linux support in 2015 when it went open source. Aspects of parity have taken years, and the Objective-C interop that isn't relevant outside Apple platforms but made adoption take off at all occupied a lot of early effort, but every Swift talk at FOSDEM today was about embedded or Linux server applications, or platform-agnostic C++ and Java interop. What can you possibly mean by "Mac only" or "bare min…

Side note, I think it was hilarious that Swift was allowed on FOSDEM. Even “free” (as in you probably don’t have to pay for a developer account to use it, *unless you want to ship some binary), Swift remains an Apple product.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#208

Post by jayd16 »

fastball wrote: post #190
gruuuk wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should have been fully open source with full linux support and parity since day one. That would actually help the language get traction. At this point it's a dying language.

What language are you using to develop native apps for macOS and iOS and visionOS and watchOS, since Swift is dying?

C#, Unity.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#209

Post by isodev »

aristofun wrote: post #177

Swift itself is a great piece of tech. But it is doomed to fail as a general widely adopted language unless apple makes few critical moves including open sourcing everything including XCode, providing support for 3d party IDE developers (because xcode is terrible), creating decent package manager, adopting testing as first class citizen etc. There is just no economical sense for anyone to invest in swift until all th…

And make it possible to run binaries on macOS/iOS etc without a mandatory subscription and US export controls. Without notarisation, anything made with Swift is practically unusable on Apple OSs
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