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Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

swift.org

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Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#211
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 believe that this long game of Swift being "good for everything" but "better for Apple platforms" will be detrimental to the language. T

uh, wasn't .NET open-sourced under exactly the same pro/con, except towards Windows hegemony?

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

AFAIK those language features are all handled in the frontend before outputting LLVM IR. LLVM optimization, code generation, linking, etc. should all be the same regardless of the source language.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#213

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.

I think if your app is on the App Store, it's kind of trusted by definition, isn't it?

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#214
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…

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…

Python is not compiled, it is interpreted, and it has many warts.

Kotlin depends on the JVM and is also not compiled.

Rust? Now you're talking. Except that it has warts, too.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#216
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either they are the best and everyone uses macOS "Best" obviously means different things to different people, but at least by market share, macOS has never been the best. Modern Apple doesn't seem to care about market share outside of the iPhone (and even then, they are still more interested in the iPhone being a premium product than winning on market share). I used to like macOS, 15-20 years ago, but now it's just…

> now it's just power-user-hostile and considerably more locked down and buggy Hm, I've been using macOS (alongside others) for the past 20 years straight. In what ways is it hostile and buggy?

Secure Enclave, having to use only signed apps and kernel extensions, stuff like that I imagine.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#217
post #85
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…

This feels similar to C# and Microsoft's other CLR/.NET languages. Sure, they've broken away a bit and aren't exclusively used to run things on MS platforms, but still. And Swift is even more tied to Apple, at least to my inexperienced eye. I'm not really an Apple person (Linux, Android), even though I once really enjoyed their hardware... Swift is so far down on my list of languages to look at that I probably will n…

> This feels similar to C# and Microsoft's other CLR/.NET languages. Sure, they've broken away a bit and aren't exclusively used to run things on MS platforms, but still.

A wrong and quite outdated statement. You can develop and run C# on Linux only using open source tooling perfectly fine. I'm using Ubuntu, LazyVim with Omnisharp, dotnet CLI for scaffolding and package management. It's in the same ballpark as Go and Rust in terms of dev experience. I don't have numbers, but I guess a large fraction of new deployments is on Linux.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#218
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels similar to C# and Microsoft's other CLR/.NET languages. Sure, they've broken away a bit and aren't exclusively used to run things on MS platforms, but still. And Swift is even more tied to Apple, at least to my inexperienced eye. I'm not really an Apple person (Linux, Android), even though I once really enjoyed their hardware... Swift is so far down on my list of languages to look at that I probably will n…

I don't understand what "broken away a bit" means. We use C#/.Net pretty much exclusively to build the backend of our web apps). Most of the devs use Mac, with some Linux. Everything is run in Kubernetes (OpenShift). we use JetBrains Rider as our IDE. C# is a very nice, very performant (faster than Go) language, the platform is mature and robust. the tooling is excellent. It gives you good garbage collection, strong…

I used C# on .NET framework (the old .NET running only on Windows) 10 years ago at work. Then I had to use it 2 years ago again, and man, did it change! ASP.NET Minimal API is absolutely awesome, as the Generic Host integrating config, logging and DI is a great too. A very mature and complete framework.

It brings everything to the table a great modern language and ecosystem needs. Even null safety.

Regarding error handling, I don't have a strong opinion yet. I think Rust has nailed it, but C# (with unchecked exceptions) didn't create any issues in the projects I worked on.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#219
post #56

The discussion here reminds me so much of early C# days. It was being touted as open source and cross platform back then, and Microsoft even hired a top GNOME developer to port it to Linux and GNOME was going to be rewritten in C#. It was going to be amazing. Never quite panned out.

> Never quite panned out.

I don't know what you're talking about, honestly. Maybe you're many years behind the current state of affairs.

.NET (core) is a very real thing. A extremely successful and powerful multi platform framework.

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