The Future of Foundation

77 points by SmileyKeith 3 years ago | 7 comments

While I feel like Swift missed the opportunity to become a popular language outside of Apple platforms, this is still fantastic news. Having the source code available for Foundation could make debugging things much easier in addition to being able to fix issues! There really is nothing more frustrating when working with Apple platforms over not being able to ever fix things. I get jealous of my Android colleagues in this area.

mark_l_watson 3 years ago | |

I wonder if this will help the uptake of Swift on Linux?

Swift is an interesting language. I more or less like it and use it about 10% of the time when hacking on personal projects, but I have only written one app in Swift (and SwiftUI.)

One interesting thing is how much Apple has improved the Playgrounds Swift IDE that runs on iPadOS and macOS. The iPad version now has functionality of publishing directly to the Apple Store. You say, probably correctly, that Swift missed the chance to be a generally popular language. Perhaps Playgrounds will increase interest?

Klonoar 3 years ago |

Interesting. Maybe this is the true death of Objective C?

pjmlp 3 years ago | |

In case people still aren't paying attention, at this years WWDC "Platforms State of the Union" keynote.

"The Objective-C language, AppKit & UIKit frameworks, and Interface Builder have empowered generations of developers. These technologies were built for each other, and will continue to serve us well for a long time to come, but over time new abstractions become necessary. For a while now, you've seen us hard at work defining the next generation of integrated language, frameworks, and tools: Swift, SwiftUI, and Xcode Previews.

Tight integration in a development platform like this requires that all three pieces be designed and evolved together, both driving and driven by one another. Swift result builders were inspired by SwiftUI's compositional structure. SwiftUI's declarative views were enabled by Swift value types. And Xcode Previews was specifically designed for, and enabled by, both. Now, the result is the best development platform that we have ever built. And this year, Swift, SwiftUI, and Xcode all have fantastic updates that take this vision further, and make it even easier for you to build great apps for all of our platforms. And it all starts with Swift."

-- https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/102/

bsaul 3 years ago |

Fantastic news for the language. This is the first step for a true life outside of apple walled garden.

pjmlp 3 years ago | |

Following the footsteps of Objective-C's success and GNUStep adoption at large.

bsaul 3 years ago | | |

I sincerely hope apple is going to remember the mistakes done with objc language and not reproduce them with swift, which is a really good language (or at least was until they began to bloat it the past two years)

But you’re right, chances are slim..