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The Swift Programming Language

developer.apple.com

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Re: The Swift Programming Language

#731

Post by Pacabel »

dbaupp wrote: post #718
Pacabel wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you honestly suggesting that Rust is stable at this point? I think that the recent, and very disruptive, ~ and box changes should completely dispel that notion. I'm merely pointing out the reality of the current situation, which some in the Rust community do not wish to acknowledge, for whatever reason. The situation has yet to change, so what I'm saying is still valid, and will remain so until some actual improv…

No, I'm not suggesting that Rust is stable. It wasn't even slightly implied by what I said. I was just pointing out that you're a broken record on this topic, to the point of being a troll (you seem to just ignore the meat of any response you get and only focus on the current state of Rust). To be crystal clear: no-one is suggesting that Rust is stable and no-one is suggesting it is ready for adoption (if they are, t…

Resort to name-calling if you really must. None of that will change reality.

Rust is not stable, as you yourself have readily admitted. What I've unfortunately had to be pointing out for such a long time now is absolutely correct.

We've been told that we can expect Rust 1.0 by the end of the year. As each month passes, it becomes less and less likely that we will actually see this. We are still seeing significant change, even as recently as the past month.

I think Rust could potentially be very useful. But that requires stability, and that in turn is something that appears more and more elusive each day.

It's easy to say that Swift isn't a competitor to Rust, but the reality is that it is. And unlike Rust, it will very, very likely be usable for serious apps within a few months. It will see the adoption that Rust could have had, had it been usable, further reducing Rust's future changes.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#732

Post by curveship »

anonymoushn wrote: post #720
curveship wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the V8 compiler bails out of several optimizations if your function uses eval. You can see this in the profiler: functions which V8 wasn't able to optimize will have an alert sign next to them, and if you click it, it'll tell you what the issue was.

This is a bit troublesome! function f() {var x = 99; return function(a,b) {return a(b)};} f()(eval, 'console.log(x);') ReferenceError: x is not defined function f() {var x = 99; return function(a,b) {return eval(b)};} f()(eval, 'console.log(x);') 99 undefined

Yep, this is as per spec: http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/5.1/#sec-10.4.2 . "Indirect" calls to eval (i.e. assigning eval to another variable, like you did by passing it as a param) are evaluated in terms of the global environment. "Direct" calls, like in your second example, use the local environment.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#734

Post by coldtea »

Pacabel wrote: post #709
dbaupp wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are you so insistent that we freeze an unsafe version of a language that's designed for safety? Pacabel has made a career of complaining about Rust being unstable.

Are you honestly suggesting that Rust is stable at this point? I think that the recent, and very disruptive, ~ and box changes should completely dispel that notion. I'm merely pointing out the reality of the current situation, which some in the Rust community do not wish to acknowledge, for whatever reason. The situation has yet to change, so what I'm saying is still valid, and will remain so until some actual improv…

>Are you honestly suggesting that Rust is stable at this point? I think that the recent, and very disruptive, ~ and box changes should completely dispel that notion.

No, he merely suggests that you bored a lot of people by repeating that it's unstable, instead of accepting the fact and using something else.

If being unstable is that bad, then by all means, go and use a stable language.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#735

Post by MaysonL »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #417
phaedryx wrote: post #241

First question that comes to mind: how open is this language? (I can't find any references to it)

Hard to say, as yet. I'd expect it to be pretty open in the end, though; they're using LLVM and the Objective C runtime, both of which are open and usable on other platforms. I guess we'll see if they release the compiler.

This will almost certainly happen when Xcode 6 gets released publicly.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#736

Post by jgamman »

tptacek wrote: post #546
georgewfraser wrote: post #523

You appear to be advocating a new: [ ] functional [X] imperative [X] object-oriented [X] procedural [X] stack-based [ ] "multi-paradigm" [ ] lazy [ ] eager [X] statically-typed [ ] dynamically-typed [ ] pure [X] impure [ ] non-hygienic [ ] visual [ ] beginner-friendly [ ] non-programmer-friendly [ ] completely incomprehensible programming language. Your language will not work. Here is why it will not work. You appear…

In addition to being a space-hogging recapitulation of an old, boring Usenet joke, a lot of your checks are wrong; some of them are because the Usenet joke is lame, but some of them are just you missing things, like the fact that Swift interacts directly with C/ObjC, uses the same IDE as Cocoa developers already use, &c. This lame Usenet joke was a way of punching down at people joining language newsgroups trying to…

WTF is usenet?

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#737

Post by nnethercote »

dbaupp wrote: post #702
pcwalton wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust's raison d'être is memory safety without garbage collection. Swift requires garbage collection to achieve memory safety. (Reference counting is a form of garbage collection.) In other words, Rust is about safety with zero overhead over C++, and Swift is not zero-overhead. So the people who need Rust are not going to use Swift for Rust's domains. That's fine, as Apple wanted a language for iOS and Mac app develop…

> Why are you so insistent that we freeze an unsafe version of a language that's designed for safety? Pacabel has made a career of complaining about Rust being unstable.

At least he/she hasn't derailed the thread by complaining about every other project that Mozilla is working on. I count that as progress!

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#738

Post by eonil »

davidw wrote: post #485
wdr1 wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open source is something Apple only does strategically - when they have to or it suits them - it is not part of the company's ethos. What Fortune 500 (or even 5000) systematically open sources every piece of technology? Every company I can think of -- Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Amazon, LinkedIn, AOL, Craigslist, Oracle, -- selectively decides what to open source. I'm not saying that's ri…

None of them are 100% open or closed, but clearly some are more open than others.

more open? what a funny joke i ever heard. please define the meaning of the more, and at least tell who is the more open one.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#739

Post by reuven »

I find it a bit sad that with all of the languages that already exist, Apple found it necessary to invent a completely new one -- and then make it proprietary. Why not use Ruby, or Python, or JavaScript -- or even Go, Rust, Clojure, or Scala? (Yes, I realize that the latter two run on the JVM, which would have been problematic in other ways.)

Heck, they could have bought RubyMotion and made Ruby the high-level language of choice for development.

I realize that Apple has a long tradition of NIH ("not invented here"), and in many cases, it suits them, and their users, quite well. But there are so many languages out there already that it seems like a waste for Apple to create a new one. Just the overhead of developing the language, nurturing its ecosystem, and ensuring compatibility seems like it'll cost more time and money than would have been necessary if they had gone with an existing language.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#740

Post by vor_ »

kibwen wrote: post #643
Pacabel wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The similarity to Rust should scare the hell out of Rust's creators and proponents. Swift could very well render Rust almost totally irrelevant within the OS X and iOS sphere of software development. If we end up eventually seeing Swift implemented for other platforms, then the chances of Rust's long-term success diminish even more. Things might have been different had a stable, even if somewhat imperfect, initial ve…

Oh hello again, Pacabel. I'm familiar with your game by now. :) We're not scared in the slightest. I'll reconsider when Swift has inline ASM, allocators, linear types, move semantics by default, region analysis, and a type system that guarantees freedom from data races (oh, and when the code is open-sourced, and targets both Linux and Windows as a first-class citizen). Swift isn't intended to be a systems language: i…

> Swift isn't intended to be a systems language: it's an application language.

It may not be ready as a systems language in its pre-1.0 form, but the Swift book claims that it's "designed to scale gracefully from ‘Hello World’ to an entire operating system", so Apple appears to have big goals.

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