Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

infoq.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 308 posts

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#81

Post by Austin_Conlon »

badprose wrote: post #76

This is extremely exciting for me. I started writing a toy application for my iPhone using SwiftUI a few months ago and have been very impressed by Swift (coming from C#). So far, SwiftUI has felt exactly like what I wished XAML would become. The documentation and error messages are a complete disaster though ( https://nooverviewavailable.com/ )

Regarding error messages, which Xcode version are you on? They substantially improved after the Xcode update with an overhauled diagnostics engine. Documentation has been steadily improving, I’ve found that Apple does respond to Feedback Assistant reports about missing overviews and code listings, albeit way slower than I’d like.

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#82

Post by viraptor »

judge2020 wrote: post #68

> . It is hard to think that any Windows programmer would prefer Swift as a language over .NET languages, as many commenters pointed out on Reddit, but a port of Swift UI on Windows could be a game changer. Everybody would jump to Swift [for new projects] if it meant a cross-platform GUI framework.

What would it provide that Qt + QML don't right now? (if we assume that the crossplatform GUI is the killer feature)

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#83

Post by giancarlostoro »

choward wrote: post #75
ashtonkem wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating a good cross-platform GUI framework is probably harder than creating a good cross-platform language.

Possibly, but that's if you include the part about making it look/feel native. If you just provide the tools the are just focused on the language and framework and let the people who care about making it look native on whichever platform it's running focus on that then I think it's doable. Unlike things like react native you wouldn't be actually using the native components necessarily unless you can implement the UI…

Heck if you go the Sciter route you can have a very well known approach but without going full Electron about it.

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#84

Post by pfranz »

viraptor wrote: post #82
judge2020 wrote: post #68

> . It is hard to think that any Windows programmer would prefer Swift as a language over .NET languages, as many commenters pointed out on Reddit, but a port of Swift UI on Windows could be a game changer. Everybody would jump to Swift [for new projects] if it meant a cross-platform GUI framework.

What would it provide that Qt + QML don't right now? (if we assume that the crossplatform GUI is the killer feature)

I'm sure licensing is a big one. It looks like SwiftUI is MIT license and Qt is dual licensed.

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#85

Post by Raymonf »

judge2020 wrote: post #68

> . It is hard to think that any Windows programmer would prefer Swift as a language over .NET languages, as many commenters pointed out on Reddit, but a port of Swift UI on Windows could be a game changer. Everybody would jump to Swift [for new projects] if it meant a cross-platform GUI framework.

> Everybody would jump to Swift [for new projects] if it meant a cross-platform GUI framework.

I wouldn't. I don't like Swift's syntax. The ecosystem would likely not be mature enough either.

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#86

Post by cycloptic »

chongli wrote: post #57
duskwuff wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two-axis scrolling isn't unique to macOS. The way that scrolling has traditionally been implemented on Linux (as mouse buttons 4 and 5) makes it difficult to implement any kind of continuous scrolling, but once you have one axis working, a second one isn't much harder. The velocity and bounce effects on scrolling are implemented at the application layer. They don't depend on any unique features of the trackpad hardwa…

The velocity and bounce effects on scrolling are implemented at the application layer. They don't depend on any unique features of the trackpad hardware or driver stack. I didn’t say they did. Oh macOS they’re not implemented by the application though, they’re implemented by the UI APIs and thus available to all applications for free. This is not the case on Linux.

It is the case on Linux. Both GTK and Qt have this built in for a while now:

https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkScrolledWindow.ht...

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qscroller.html

Why it's not working on your applications is a different question.

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#87

Post by rapsey »

viraptor wrote: post #82
judge2020 wrote: post #68

> . It is hard to think that any Windows programmer would prefer Swift as a language over .NET languages, as many commenters pointed out on Reddit, but a port of Swift UI on Windows could be a game changer. Everybody would jump to Swift [for new projects] if it meant a cross-platform GUI framework.

What would it provide that Qt + QML don't right now? (if we assume that the crossplatform GUI is the killer feature)

Pricing and not being c++

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#88

Post by quantummkv »

viraptor wrote: post #82
judge2020 wrote: post #68

> . It is hard to think that any Windows programmer would prefer Swift as a language over .NET languages, as many commenters pointed out on Reddit, but a port of Swift UI on Windows could be a game changer. Everybody would jump to Swift [for new projects] if it meant a cross-platform GUI framework.

What would it provide that Qt + QML don't right now? (if we assume that the crossplatform GUI is the killer feature)

A modern, powerful memory safe language? C++ is hardly a good choice for making casual small GUI apps.

Re: Swift 5.3 Will Be Supported on Windows and Additional Linux Distributions

#90

Post by saagarjha »

zelly wrote: post #72
awinter-py wrote: post #59

linux builds of ios apps would lead to general improvement in the state of build tooling for mobile (IMO) I take it this isn't that?

This will never happen. Part of the reason programmers or aspiring programmers buy MacBooks is they think they will be working on iApps at some point in time. This is an example of the most intolerant minority winning[1]. I may have to use Windows to make games, but I can install Windows on a MacBook. I cannot install MacOS on a laptop with Windows or Linux pre-installed. [1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intol…

> Part of the reason programmers or aspiring programmers buy MacBooks is they think they will be working on iApps at some point in time.

Or perhaps they like the hardware or OS and have no intention to work on apps?

Post reply on HN