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Swift 3.0 Released

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31–40 of 95 posts

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#31
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.

I don't want to have to ship apps containing the entire runtime. I'm waiting for the stable ABI.

As well, I'm happy to let the keen early-adopters be the guinea pigs. Xcode 8 only came out today. If you have production apps, it's madness to upgrade on day one. I'll wait a few weeks/months for the remaining bugs to shake out.

Don't get me wrong I'm very pro-Swift. But I'm also mindful of my time and sanity. Switching to a new language sure sounds fun, but not exactly productive (in the short term). When I do switch, I want everything to be rock solid, stable, all the tools, docs and everything.

But I have created a couple of toy projects in Swift, and I'm very excited to start using it properly in a year or two.

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#32

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

It makes a lot of sense, though. Like many new languages Swift was invented hastily and without much care with the main goal of locking in developers and preventing cross-platform development. If Apple made major releases backwards-compatible, this would invariably turn the language into a big mess in the long run. This way, the language can evolve into a fine language with many features from Algol-68 and the usual s…

[deleted]

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#33

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.

This usually madness for production projects, unless you're Apple (or Microsoft in the 90s).

But I wish Python 3 did the same with its libraries.

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#34

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 ..

No need to hold off - now is actually the time to start learning Swift, as it's taking off. If you've written existing code, it will take you minor effort to translate the code (in most cases) and you can also use the code migrator tool.

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#35
post #9
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The conversion tools failed pretty badly in my case. I had to do a ton of manual fixes. There are also still a lot of libraries out there that haven't updated yet so unfortunately I'm holding off on updating for now.

For us it worked quite fine for macOS but not for iOS targets. It also changed the function names for a lot @IBAction functions but did not update the connection in the interface builder. So now I have to a lot of testing to make sure all buttons work.

Still I have to admit it shows quite courage (get it?) to change so many things but naming is important and I see it positively. Only if Apple would use version numbers for Swift that would fit to the state, if you have that kind of fast update cycle and that many breaking changes a version number below 1.0 would have been better for Swift 1 and 2.

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#36
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't want to have to ship apps containing the entire runtime. I'm waiting for the stable ABI. As well, I'm happy to let the keen early-adopters be the guinea pigs. Xcode 8 only came out today. If you have production apps, it's madness to upgrade on day one. I'll wait a few weeks/months for the remaining bugs to shake out. Don't get me wrong I'm very pro-Swift. But I'm also mindful of my time and sanity. Switching…

I've only recently gotten into iOS development and the state of XCode amazes me. It's awful. Frequent crashes, disappearing tests, syntax highlight shutting down... it really makes me wish there were an alternative.

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#37
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

What won't happen, havoc in the ecosystem? How is Apple relevant?

> Swift 3.x has a large amount of syntax changes.

Yes?

> The compiler helps with the refactoring but it's still work.

That's not what I'm talking about. A bit of drudge work is fine, the issue of the Python transition is that you get usually hard to debug runtime failures down the line, possibly for a long, long time. With Swift, I assume the compiler just keeps complaining until you've converted everything more or less properly, you may have a few nits but you don't keep finding new breakages.

Re: Swift 3.0 Released

#39
Swift 3.0 is really nice but I backtracked out of Xcode 8.0 for now. I am used to Xcode but this one still vomits Apple internal debug messages into the console, that's really too rough for me. I'll wait for the .01 or the .1 before upgrading all my projects.

Funny thing is I downloaded one of the first if not the first beta of Xcode 8 and it already migrated my projects flawlessly (where possible). It's all the other stuff that's broken.

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