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Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

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Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#231

Post by ericlewis »

NateEag wrote: post #227
egeozcan wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript is a language that's neither abstracted from the basic programming concepts nor its syntax is alien. Most of the people who picked it up can learn many other mainstream programming languages in a week, if not a weekend. Add 1-2 more weeks and they're writing GUI code. Yet, they don't. JavaScript is popular for pragmatic reasons (a.k.a. "it delivers results"), so is PHP. They aren't the best languages, but…

So much this. I work primarily in JS and PHP. They are both deeply, deeply flawed (though I have learned to love JS's good parts, while I still hate PHP). I have programmed in many languages - Java, Python, Scheme, and Bash are all ones I've worked in professionally, and I've spent plenty of time in Emacs Lisp. This doesn't touch on the ones I've tinkered with for fun. JS and PHP are not the best languages, but they…

PHP is absolutely still used on the “front end” Facebook still deploys loads of it in places. SSR is still better using PHP.

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#232

Post by NateEag »

ericlewis wrote: post #231
NateEag wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. I work primarily in JS and PHP. They are both deeply, deeply flawed (though I have learned to love JS's good parts, while I still hate PHP). I have programmed in many languages - Java, Python, Scheme, and Bash are all ones I've worked in professionally, and I've spent plenty of time in Emacs Lisp. This doesn't touch on the ones I've tinkered with for fun. JS and PHP are not the best languages, but they…

PHP is absolutely still used on the “front end” Facebook still deploys loads of it in places. SSR is still better using PHP.

I think of "front end" as meaning "executed in browsers."

How are you using it?

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#233

Post by dep_b »

seanparsons wrote: post #196
zapzupnz wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dismissive responses like this are frowned upon by the HN community guidelines. Give your reasonings, not a snide remark.

OK then: - Slow compilation, I think even now immutably concatenating a handful of strings makes the compile time exponential. - Over reliance on keywords and special case syntax, magic doesn't compose. A bunch of it just supports Optional for example. - Xcode, nuff said. - Equatable and Hashable for tuples were implemented with invisible compiler magic, so they wouldn't work with generics. - Variance is hot garbage,…

Sounds like you describe the state of Swift at least three years ago. SourceKit just doesn't crash anymore on me anymore, ever. Compile times are quite good for me nowadays, still not as fast as Objective-C but then again you don't get compile time guarantees for free.

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#234

Post by jmull »

myko wrote: post #40

> It is not clear at the moment if Apple has any plans to port Swift UI to Windows and/or Linux It seems pretty clear they have 0 plans on doing that. They could've open sourced it in the first place, along with Combine. Not open sourcing Combine seems like a pretty short sighted decision to me.

It seems like it could still be coming. They might be following the same pattern for SwiftUI (and Combine) that they used with Swift itself:

1. Create and introduce it as proprietary

2. Iterate fast, changing a lot of things to improve it quickly.

3. Stablize

4. Open source it (and continue iterating with an open process)

The advantage to starting proprietary is the initial iteration phase can move move quickly and stay focused on the goals of the people in the controlling group.

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#235

Post by mhh__ »

realharo wrote: post #148
fmxexpress wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embarcadero was able to do it with Delphi. Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux. Single codebase single UI. It looks like the bear is in keeping up with all the platform updates all the time though.

Whether it is actually good is subjective though. There are tons of existing cross-platform UI frameworks (Qt, wx, libui, JavaFX, TornadoFX, ...). The comment above says "Everybody would jump to Swift [for new projects] if it meant a cross-platform GUI framework." And yet people are still wondering why Electron ends up being the technology of choice for so many desktop apps.

I think people would switch if it had Apple money behind it.

Qt is pretty good but QtQuick can be fairly barren in some areas i.e. if you want a embedded spreadsheet you're out of luck unless you make your own.

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#236

Post by pjmlp »

jabl wrote: post #221
pjmlp wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OCaml fits the bill.

Yeah, or Haskell. But those have been out there in a more or less mature form for decades, with no major uptake in sight. I guess they're just too esoteric for them to reach critical mass. So here I am, stuck with bash/python/C, and dabbling a bit with Rust..

If you would like to work in finance or compiler development, there is enough uptake of ML derived languages.

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#237

Post by manmal »

saagarjha wrote: post #202
manmal wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has to ensure that Swift is adopted as widely as possible to ensure that enough people in the world are theoretically able to submit apps to their store.

Nobody is submitting Windows apps written in Swift to the Mac App Store.

That’s not what I implied. Without a vibrant app ecosystem, way less iDevices would be sold. Without developers, the ecosystem suffers.

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#238

Post by kitsunesoba »

DagAgren wrote: post #190
ksec wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the thing I dont like about the current Apple. They used to release things where you see they put a lot of thoughts into it. Now they are half baked. This isn't so much a problem on Apps ( The Product ) where it is constantly being updated and tweaked. But with code you have the hassle to try and keep up. And the pace of improvement is very very slow. To put things into perspective, Swift UI has been developm…

> But somehow after nearly 6 years Objective-C stills feels better This experience is shared by basically nobody? I used to love Objective-C, which was unusual even before Swift, but I would not in a million years switch back to using it. Swift is so much better in every single way.

Yeah. There are _aspects_ of Obj-C that are still nice, but as a whole I find Swift way better to work with on day to day basis. For that matter, I prefer it over syntactically similar languages like Kotlin too. If I could just write Swift everywhere that’d be great.

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#239

Post by monocularvision »

vlozko wrote: post #228
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift is already way more popular than dart though. But Swift doesn't run on Android, does it?

It does. It has been able to for some time now. A team I’ve worked with used it to build a cross-platform library. Swift wasn’t the first choice but the short story was they didn’t choose C++ because they didn’t want to hire C++ devs to maintain it.

Did the team look at Kotlin? Seems like Kotlin Native on iOS is a more viable alternative than Swift on Android right now for cross-platform development.

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#240

Post by kitsunesoba »

doteka wrote: post #177
sophiebits wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious to hear more about what SwiftUI does better than React… any place I can read more?

The official Apple tutorial gives you an idea what they were going for, but in practice it’s nowhere near that smooth. In fact, most of the time I found myself staring at a “type too complex, add annotation” error. That one doesn’t actually mean your type is too complex, it just means you’re passing the wrong thing somewhere and instead of a useful error message the compiler just gave up and broke.

Errors in SwiftUI are significantly better in the recently released Swift 5.2, so this is clearly something they’re working on.
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