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Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

swift.org

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Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#61

Post by threeseed »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #42
uhura wrote: 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 doubt Apple really cares much about competing with other languages, tooling, or platforms when it comes to Swift or Xcode. They have a completely captured audience and ecosystem, and anything beyond that isn’t even a "best effort" — it's more like, "You're welcome to see if it works for you, but don’t bother us if it doesn't."

a) If Apple didn't care about competition they wouldn't have created Swift.

b) They don't have a captured ecosystem at all. You can write iOS/macOS apps using Flutter, React Native etc. All of which are detrimental to Apple because they force apps to adopt a lowest common denominator approach and not use the latest Apple technologies.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#62

Post by thih9 »

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: post #46
uhura wrote: 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…

> why would I waste my time working on a language that is too tied to the Apple platform

This might work the other way round: starting from people familiar with macos or ios development who want to write for other platforms.

Then the question becomes: why would a developer learn a different open source language when they can use what they already know. And sure, depending on the context they might still go with Python/Kotlin/Rust/etc.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#63

Post by cosmic_cheese »

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: post #46
uhura wrote: 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…

Can only speak for myself, but I’d love to be able to use Swift elsewhere so I don’t need to drag around a JVM and all the things that come with it (Kotlin) or have to wrestle with Rust’s sematics and disinclination towards old style imperative desktop UI development. Swift isn't perfect of course, but it’s the closest I’ve come to a language feeling “comfy”.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#64

Post by threeseed »

tempodox wrote: post #41
tux3 wrote: post #4

The goal for Swift should (and seems) to be to gradually separate itself from XCode, which is holding it back from its ambitions. XCode has been compared to many things, but at 3.1 stars on the App store, one must find that it is still slightly overrated.

I feel like Swift is being held hostage by Apple. I can't get get the next version of Swift, because it's being distributed with a higher version of Xcode that only runs on an OS version I don't want to install (yet), and even if I did, I'd first have to buy a new Mac for that. That trick seems to work with enough developers to make Apple ever more rich and powerful and even more arrogant (if that's possible at all),…

> I'd first have to buy a new Mac for that

Which means you are running Mojave and your Mac is at least 6 years old.

I wouldn't expect anyone to support developers who are running a two generation old OS.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#65

Post by mojuba »

alain_gilbert wrote: post #60

Swift is a really cool language. But one thing that blows my mind is that if you ever encounter an "index out of range" error, the (massive) error message that you get doesn't tell you anything about where this error occurred... no line number... no nothing... let a = [1] print(a[1]) Is all you have to do to reproduce the error. The error looks something like that https://pastebin.com/MQV82SaR And gives you no useful…

You have a stack dump, which means you will get all the information if you symbolicate your crash report. Xcode can do it for you automatically, but some manual methods also exist.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#66

Post by Pesthuf »

alain_gilbert wrote: post #60

Swift is a really cool language. But one thing that blows my mind is that if you ever encounter an "index out of range" error, the (massive) error message that you get doesn't tell you anything about where this error occurred... no line number... no nothing... let a = [1] print(a[1]) Is all you have to do to reproduce the error. The error looks something like that https://pastebin.com/MQV82SaR And gives you no useful…

What if you follow the advice here

>Stack dump without symbol names (ensure you have llvm-symbolizer in your PATH or set the environment var `LLVM_SYMBOLIZER_PATH` to point to it):

?

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#67

Post by isodev »

st3fan wrote: post #43
isodev wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really being released? Although some parts of the language and build chains are technically open source (as in, you can see the code), the project is still completely controlled by Apple at the top.

You are wrong about "some parts" - you can browse github.com/swiftlang to find out. About control - serious question: how is this different from for example Rust, Go, Zig or Python? For each of those you can submit a change proposal through an official process and you can submit code changes through a pull request. But also for each of those there is a non-zero chance that a smaller group of people who do governance…

You’re only focusing on access to source code, the comment is about leadership and decision making. Remember the OmniSharp story around VSCode from just two years ago? It’s a very high profile example of what can (and eventually will) happen with corporate-controlled projects.

Swift can’t evolve or even exist without Apple and so unless you’re Apple, then Swift is too great of a risk.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#68

Post by compootr »

alain_gilbert wrote: post #60

Swift is a really cool language. But one thing that blows my mind is that if you ever encounter an "index out of range" error, the (massive) error message that you get doesn't tell you anything about where this error occurred... no line number... no nothing... let a = [1] print(a[1]) Is all you have to do to reproduce the error. The error looks something like that https://pastebin.com/MQV82SaR And gives you no useful…

Verbosity. That's..... yap-ple!

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#69

Post by homarp »

krupan wrote: 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.

do you remember who was the 'top GNOME developer'?

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#70

Post by robotresearcher »

mojuba wrote: post #65
alain_gilbert wrote: post #60

Swift is a really cool language. But one thing that blows my mind is that if you ever encounter an "index out of range" error, the (massive) error message that you get doesn't tell you anything about where this error occurred... no line number... no nothing... let a = [1] print(a[1]) Is all you have to do to reproduce the error. The error looks something like that https://pastebin.com/MQV82SaR And gives you no useful…

You have a stack dump, which means you will get all the information if you symbolicate your crash report. Xcode can do it for you automatically, but some manual methods also exist.

Indeed the error report being complained about explains this and tells you how to fix it.

Maybe the friendly default would be to have the symbolicated reports on, but perhaps this has performance impact so it’s off.

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