How does this compare to DCOM? (disclaimer, I've never used it)
Much better.
Consider yourself lucky not having to deal with raw IDL without VS tooling and ATL template metaprogramming.
Swift Distributed Actors
41–50 of 135 posts
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I skimmed through the blog post, and it seems to me that they are not claiming they invented something new, just that they are adding this to Swift language. (Distributed) actor model is nothing new, but I definitely wouldn't classify it as something that's common in other languages. To my knowledge Erlang/OTP is the only mainstream language where this is part of the standard library. There are implementations for ot…
They are adding features they 'took' to put it kindly from other existing, mature implementations without giving any credit or acknowledgement. Not only that, they expect people to test their beta grade software because they keep releasing it half baked ever since the release of Swift itself. It's embarrassing and it also angers me because these companies have wall gardened their ecosystems to proprietary languages a…
We get it, you know nothing about Swift, but hate it.
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#43Nice to see swift trying to make a dent in server programming using shiny new features, however i would have liked something on the android side instead. Being able to reuse code between ios and android, including foundation api, would have made an easy way to grow the user base. it's going to be hard to put swift in the hands of go or kotlin devs..
There was once a really nice open source cross-platform framework called Apportable that provided an Obj-C compatibility layer on Android. You could develop your app on iOS and then last moment build it on Android with some minimal changes. I tried it for one of my projects and it worked just great. Guess what happened to Apportable? It was quietly acquired by Google and completely shut down within days, with practic…
I don’t see how they would block apple from providing a good experience without crippling the whole NDK community
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#44if making such things a language feature is what you need to do then fine, but for a lot of languages with good meta (like javascript's proxies) one should be able to build things with similar ergonomics & capabilities without having to expand the language.
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#45Where is the side to side comparison of features and to-do between this and existing distributed actor implementations, such as erlang + otp or java and whatever thing it uses? This approach of ignoring the rest of the world and explaining Swift concepts as if they exist in a vacuum is frustrating and counter-productive. Even if this were a totally new feature, I'd expect links to research papers. It is one thing to…
I skimmed through the blog post, and it seems to me that they are not claiming they invented something new, just that they are adding this to Swift language. (Distributed) actor model is nothing new, but I definitely wouldn't classify it as something that's common in other languages. To my knowledge Erlang/OTP is the only mainstream language where this is part of the standard library. There are implementations for ot…
> Orleans for dotnet
Also Akka for .NET and my echo-process library
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hope Swift can eventually become more of a general purpose language, as its actually pretty nice and they're introducing features like this that clearly targets server-side programming. I hope for this too. I did a personal project in Swift on Linux and found that I loved the language. However, I was greatly frustrated by the lack of libraries. For Swift to reach the mainstream, IMHO, the Swift Foundation needs t…
> MHO, the Swift Foundation needs to move much more of the ecosystem to platforms other than Apple's. I suspect Apple is trying to do this for straightforward reasons like wanting to remain relevant and foster community growth as to retain credibility… while also subtly trying to not encourage the use of Swift as a language for any other GUI framework/platform than Cocoa + macOS. Obviously I don’t have any evidence t…
> X11 for macOS is dead
I don’t think this is nefarious. X11 is a klunky GUI, at best, compared with pretty much everything else out there. It really can’t hold a candle to more developed GUI systems.
I was never interested in Swift as a server language, but that’s mainly because of the “chicken-and-egg” thing, as it was not supported by server infrastructure. I love the language, itself.
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hope Swift can eventually become more of a general purpose language, as its actually pretty nice and they're introducing features like this that clearly targets server-side programming. I hope for this too. I did a personal project in Swift on Linux and found that I loved the language. However, I was greatly frustrated by the lack of libraries. For Swift to reach the mainstream, IMHO, the Swift Foundation needs t…
> MHO, the Swift Foundation needs to move much more of the ecosystem to platforms other than Apple's. I suspect Apple is trying to do this for straightforward reasons like wanting to remain relevant and foster community growth as to retain credibility… while also subtly trying to not encourage the use of Swift as a language for any other GUI framework/platform than Cocoa + macOS. Obviously I don’t have any evidence t…
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Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#48This seems like a super interesting feature to have as part of a language. I hope Swift can eventually become more of a general purpose language, as its actually pretty nice and they're introducing features like this that clearly targets server-side programming. However it seems right now its tied to much to just iOS development and Xcode, which doesn't make for a great experience using it for other things.
My experience is the opposite: using Swift for Apple ecosystem development basically removed all of the benefits that Swift the language offered. It’s clearly designed as a general purpose language, and its adoption mostly curtailed by this reputation.
I’ve been using Swift to develop Apple software since 2014. I’ve released quite a few apps, written with it. Before that, I used ObjC. I’m extremely happy with Swift.
As far as adoption goes, many large codebases are likely still ObjC; simply because of hysteresis. Major architectural shifts take a lot of time, money and risk. That’s one reason I don’t feel that much urgency to jump on the SwiftUI/Async stuff (but I like what I see). I’m interested in shipping, and shipping is almost always a couple (or more) steps back from “the bleeding edge.”
In my experience, there’s not much of a downside to waiting for tech to mature and stabilize, other than not having jargon on my CV.
Swift was unusual for me. I started learning it, and releasing apps in it, right away. It was a gamble, and it paid off. There’s lots of folks that are probably just getting started with Swift, now.
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> MHO, the Swift Foundation needs to move much more of the ecosystem to platforms other than Apple's. I suspect Apple is trying to do this for straightforward reasons like wanting to remain relevant and foster community growth as to retain credibility… while also subtly trying to not encourage the use of Swift as a language for any other GUI framework/platform than Cocoa + macOS. Obviously I don’t have any evidence t…
My understanding (and I invite correction if I'm mistaken) is that the Swift Foundation was created to address the principal concerns you've articulated. But ports have been slow: Linux works but with the previously mentioned lack of libraries, and there is a threadbare port to Windows which barely runs. The app I was working on was CLI-based that generated a log; and even for that non-UI use case, basic libraries we…
> is that the Swift Foundation was created to address the principal concerns you've articulated
Swift does not have an incorporated "Swift Foundation", instead Swift.org's about-us page is surprisingly frank about Apple's control over the language and ecosystem ( https://swift.org/community/ ):
> Apple Inc. is the project lead and serves as the arbiter for the project. The project lead makes senior appointments to leadership roles, with those leaders coming from the worldwide Swift community of contributors
And the site's footnote reminds us that Swift.org is not separate from Apple, but again, owned by Apple Inc.
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On an unrelated note, the .NET Foundation had an upset a few weeks ago: https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/11/dotnet_foundation_com...
Re: Swift Distributed Actors
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hope Swift can eventually become more of a general purpose language, as its actually pretty nice and they're introducing features like this that clearly targets server-side programming. I hope for this too. I did a personal project in Swift on Linux and found that I loved the language. However, I was greatly frustrated by the lack of libraries. For Swift to reach the mainstream, IMHO, the Swift Foundation needs t…
> MHO, the Swift Foundation needs to move much more of the ecosystem to platforms other than Apple's. I suspect Apple is trying to do this for straightforward reasons like wanting to remain relevant and foster community growth as to retain credibility… while also subtly trying to not encourage the use of Swift as a language for any other GUI framework/platform than Cocoa + macOS. Obviously I don’t have any evidence t…
>remember how Java AWT/Swing apps were like on OS X?
Imagine if Apple /Microsoft would invest some dev hours in Java/Qt so it keeps up with the updates they put out, we could get decent cross platform apps but Apple/Microsoft don't want cross platform apps/games.