As someone coming from Python and Java but always dissuaded by Objective C's menacing syntax, I am 100% behind the new change.
The Swift Programming Language
801–810 of 970 posts
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#802500+ comments and the term asynchronous does not appear once. It is a platform pain point, several languages have baked in support for async scenarios and Apple comes up with a whole new language, ignores it and a forum full of language geeks talks about it and no one points out it is missing.
Haha, I was searching for "async" and "await" keyword and only your post mentioned it
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#803I'm not even an iOS developer but this is by far the most exciting thing I heard in the keynote. As an amatuer/hobbyist programmer who's self-taught with Ruby, JavaScript, etc., the one thing that was keeping me from experimenting with iOS apps was Objective-C. I know I could tackle it, but it's been hard to take the plunge. I don't know much about Swift yet, but from what I've seen it looks very exciting. So if Appl…
I don't get the hate. Yeah, syntax is unfamiliar, bu once I got used to it I began to really enjoy objective-c. Ymmv etc., but it's now one of my fav languages - though I guess this is mostly due to cocoa
To someone on the outside of ObjC, its just SO DAMN VERBOSE. It's unapproachable the same way Java is unapproachable.
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#804Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My apologies, I didn't realize that expecting a programming language to have a stable syntax, stable semantics, a stable standard library and at least one stable and robust implementation before using it seriously in industry was merely a "game" You also didn't realize that you just built the biggest strawman ever in the above sentence. Enough with the "I want a stable Rust now". Rust, like any other language, take…
Well, we aren't actually seeing stabilization when it comes to Rust. Assuming this stabilization actually does happen, whether it happens in public or private is irrelevant. What matters is that we've seen C++ stabilize. We've seen Go stabilize. We've seen Scala stabilize. And now we'll likely see Swift stabilize, well before Rust does. They are all serious competitors to Rust. As these other languages continue to ev…
* Scala has been around since 2004 (public release) -- 10 years ago. (Not sure when the first stable release was but more than 3 years.)
* Go in 2009 (public) -- 6 years ago. 1.0 (first stable release) was released in 2012 so it took 3 years to stabilize.
* C++ in 1983 -- 31 years ago. ... It's been a long time.
* Clojure in 2007 -- 7 years ago. The creator took 2 1/2 years before releasing it to the public.
* Rust in 2012 -- 2 years ago.
It's pretty absurd to expect Rust to be stable right from the get go. The difference in all this is that most of those languages were closed before being released. Rust was open at a pretty early state.
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#805Ok, what about runtime support for older devices/iOS versions? They didn't say anything about it.
They said that they were accepting apps built with Swift for iOS 8 and OSX 10.10 so sounds like it won't work with older OS version. They weren't all that specific about it though so I could be wrong.
Perhaps the bridging to all the Cocoa libs won't be supported pre iOS8
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#806Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure it wasn't just because you were then no longer doing a large memcpy repeatedly?
Yes it was entirely covered by that :) I think it was covered by "naive memory management" and "shitty outsourcing". I'm paid to fix their stuff.
If the problem was just the time taken to do a 1MB copy inside a loop, why did you say the problem was clearing the CPU caches?
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#807I'm not even an iOS developer but this is by far the most exciting thing I heard in the keynote. As an amatuer/hobbyist programmer who's self-taught with Ruby, JavaScript, etc., the one thing that was keeping me from experimenting with iOS apps was Objective-C. I know I could tackle it, but it's been hard to take the plunge. I don't know much about Swift yet, but from what I've seen it looks very exciting. So if Appl…
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#808First 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.
Object C was created through changing the GCC and hence had to be released as open source due to the licensing of GCC (I believe) [1]. Swift is an apple invention and I would predict that they have no intention of releasing source code of it for availability on other platforms. Apple is a very closed ecosystem.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C#Popularization_thro...
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#809I 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 langua…
In one word: Lockin
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#810Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I'm thinking about starting the "Rust contributor points out how Rust is a systems language and $language is an applications language" drinking game. At least now they'll focus on Swift instead of Go. I don't mean this to be rude; I've just noticed a similar set of usernames in threads about certain !Rust languages playing the underdog position and always feeling like they need to compare. Given Rust's PR, speaking o…
> not a thread about Go passes without at least three pcwalton comments these days
Well, every thread about Go inevitably has numerous comments comparing it to Rust, often erroneously, and pcwalton is one of the primary Rust developers.