Swift 6.4 Released(swift.org) |
Swift 6.4 Released(swift.org) |
I’m particularly impressed at the team’s continued investment in non-Apple platforms. IMO, true cross platform Swift codebases still seems out of reach for most shops. But if they keep this up for a few more years then Swift could become a very compelling cross platform language — for both systems and application programming.
The big hurdle they need to figure out is the standard library and especially SwiftUI. SwiftUI is the single most important library that essentially all Apple swift codebases use, so until there is a real cross platform SwiftUI then for app programming IMO Swift will remain a novelty.
There are other frameworks, like eg Network.framework, which really should be in the stdlib as well.
All the compiler features are there. Others can make similar libraries or other new libraries.
But I don’t see why Apple would ever release that outside Apple land. Swift can still be used for shared logic and server stuff and command line tools and GUIs using other libraries.
Which was open sourced sometime back, and builds iOS and Android apps, which is really neat, because it means your Android app's logic etc is all natively compiled, only a shim of Java to run it. I wish Google would let people publish standard compiled binaries for their OS instead of just making everything rely on the ART.
Honestly, I am jealous of the number of RAD IDEs from the 90s and early 00s we need to start investing in good tooling again.
Every time I set out to learn I just feel like I'm being an idiot because in a year, or now, nobody will hand code anything. And even if we still reckon that some knowledge will be required to verify the voluminous output of AI there is now a vast moat of Jr. unemployability that has arisen making it exponentially harder to justify learning to code in the first place?
groan
Now, if AI eating the world doesn't matter to you, then just learn what you want to learn.
It's the people who haven't done the grind of learning a new language so have the problem, since LLM will give them solutions but not experience.
Any attributes or keywords relating to Objective-C or interop are not everyday baggage for most people.
For SwiftUI, attributes seem like as good a choice as anything else.
As a whole concurrency is a mishmash syntactic mess, but I agree with the direction and the result, they're trying to manage the improvements they keep adding over years of investment.
From that post: "Shared Swift code: 1.47 million lines (66% of the web app, 34% of the iOS app)"
Here's a more comprehensive list of different platform examples: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-embedded-examples
(About?) the same list in a nicely formatted way: https://www.swift.org/get-started/embedded/
Interesting tidbit about not having the Foundation library. Every Swift project I worked on had to import that, so I imagine it's annoying to lose that
Has anyone tried either? Would love to hear your experience with them.
```
let result = try await Subprocess.run(
.name("ls"),
arguments: ["-la"],
output: .string(limit: 4096)
print(result.standardOutput)`
```
reminds me that macOS could really use something like powershell (I know you can run powershell on macOS) where you pass around structured data, rather than the endless parsing and reparsing. This is mostly a feature of the shell but you do need some language infrastructure to accomplish it.
And both .NET and COM and the object-oriented history of Windows is probably also why PowerShell will never really feel "at home" on UNIX platforms, for better or worse.
[1] https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-embedded-examples/blob/ma...
No more 2 (or maybe 3 for carbon?) implementations.
Hopefully this will let them add features and fix bugs faster.
The number of keywords in Swift is not an uncommon criticism . Even Chris Lattner is critical of the direction Swift went in after its inception. I'm not sure what you're referring to with "order matters," but SwiftUI's issues go far beyond the order of the modifiers used.
https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...
- it was unstable and kept changing (less of an issue now)
- I still need to know bash due to its ubiquity
- it was worse than python for data crunching scripts (ide tooling + my familiarity)
This was several years ago so I'm curious about a more recent perspective
For me the larger problems were the lack of types which in practice meant that I was running into the same problems as with bash.