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Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

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Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#71

Post by dcow »

pkulak wrote: post #58
dcow wrote: post #20

I am pretty certain that most of high level use cases for Rust could be replaced with Swift, with increased developer velocity, if Swift was actually cross platform. And that's coming from a Rust fan. It will be interesting to see how effective this rewrite is.

I don't know if you can write high-throughput systems with 100% reference counted GC. Swift is targeted at UI work pretty hard.

Well that's why I said high level application use cases and not systems. Ideally I'd love to see a compile mode for modules where certain conveniences were enabled like: auto-clone, unified reference/owned types, disabled lifetimes and instead borrows become auto-wrapped-arcs, etc. That way you could care about that stuff in modules where it matters, and ignore it in areas where you prefer convenience over zero-cost abstractions and raw performance.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#72

Post by dilap »

saagarjha wrote: post #60
dilap wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice would be what the resulting apps turn out like. In my experience, old-school ObjC iOS and Mac apps generally tended to be quite snappy. On the other hand, the new Swift hotness of Messages and Settings on macOS are noticably slower than what they're replacing. Of course I haven't done a comprehensive inventory, but I certainly don't have the general impression of things getting faster with Swift. (Are the…

Messages is largely an Objective-C codebase.

Ah, my bad, I just assumed the new version would be in Swift.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#77

Post by neonsunset »

etse wrote: post #39
dcow wrote: post #20

I am pretty certain that most of high level use cases for Rust could be replaced with Swift, with increased developer velocity, if Swift was actually cross platform. And that's coming from a Rust fan. It will be interesting to see how effective this rewrite is.

How would you compare Swift with Kotlin in terms of being a good stand-in for high-level Rust? I've not paid attention to Kotlin in a while, but it seems like there's more progress at supporting Kotlin across more platforms (Kotlin native, web?, etc). I'm curious if people feel that the language features and design are at about parity, or if one is significantly stronger/weaker.

Another scenario where an often missed and underrated choice would be C#.

Nowadays it runs everywhere and supports a variety of deployment targets (relying on local runtime, packaging it together into a single somewhat compact binary, natively compiling the code (NativeAOT, it's good but has some limitations) or mixing and matching all of the above).

It is also one of the best high-level languages to write performance-oriented code with, especially so with .NET 7 which allows writing cross-platform SIMD code in a similar fashion to Rust's 'portable-simd' crate.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#78

Post by oneplane »

meitham wrote: post #75

Could someone please explain what exactly is the “Foundation”?

It's the base framework where types like NSObject, NSString, NSDictionary etc. are defined. It's right there in the article. It also explains why it exists, what others exist, and what a rewrite will bring.

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#79

Post by macinjosh »

I was in a line once at WWDC in 2011. I happened to be in front of a group of Apple engineers. I overheard them discussing a rumored functional-ish language that Apple was to switch to from Obj-C. They didn't know what it was but they seemed skeptical that it would ever be put into real use. Glad to see it only took 11 years for it to permeate down to the Foundation framework. :)

Re: Apple announces full Swift rewrite of the Foundation framework (2022)

#80

Post by mayoff »

avisser wrote: post #35
mplewis9z wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my impression is that the support on Linux within the Foundation is not complete It is not, but it's like 95% of the way there in my experience - most things that are missing are relatively recent additions that have some complex OS interactions, like filesystem I/O with language-level concurrency features. > Does this change imply better (eventual) support on non-Darwin systems? Yes. The non-Darwin Foundation vers…

It feels off to call things like Array part of any library when you have array literal syntax `let oddNumbers = [1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15]` I'd call that a language feature. Or maybe with Swift there is a blurry line between the two?

Array is defined in the Swift standard library, but the compiler knows about the type directly, and also recognizes various @_semantics("array.blah") annotations that appear in the standard library source code. I believe the semantics annotations are primarily to help the optimizer.

https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/stdlib/public/core/...

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