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Technically? Nothing, you can do many things with Swift as a systems level language, and there are some interesting aspects to it. Swift was my first introducti

by hguant 6y ago

Technically? Nothing, you can do many things with Swift as a systems level language, and there are some interesting aspects to it. Swift was my first introduction to the power of traits and protocols, and I'll be forever fond of it for that. However, for the project I was on, when I was working on it, Swift on Linux was a massive pain in the ass, mostly due to documentation and dependency hell. Documentation was extremely useless; the number of times I was told "oh yes there's a swift way to do that!" only to find out the 'swift' way was to wrap a Cocoa library or just drop in some Objective-C module. If I recall correctly, there was an issue with pthreads not being properly implemented at the time, relying on some hacks to get it to 'work' while they figured out a 1.0 implementation. We got it to work, eventually, but the hoops we had to jump through really pushed our team to Rust as our general purpose systems language. I'm glad they seem to have got it working, but I'm never subjecting myself to trying to get Apple's nonesense working outside of iOS or macOS again.

sedatk 6y ago
So, you had problems with the exact same thing Apple set out to fix with open System library? I’d say they are on the right track then.
andrewjl 6y ago
Supporting a language fully on a variety of non-Apple platforms is a massive undertaking. Even assuming for the sake of argument, unlimited funding, there's still the issue of finding the right talent, as well as expending limited managerial bandwidth for oversight & prioritization. I think the Linux support that already exists is an awesome start. But the only realistic way to see more from Apple on this is if they themselves start to deploy critical Swift web-services on their own backend infra. (I'm assuming here that they run Linux systems somewhere in their stack.) That will give them the incentive to take it to the next level. Until then it's largely left to the community to find the energy and time to do this.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Apparently Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Azul, Mozilla managed to do it. Apple has enough in the bank to do it as well.

by hguant 6y ago

sedatk 6y ago

So, you had problems with the exact same thing Apple set out to fix with open System library? I’d say they are on the right track then.

andrewjl 6y ago

Supporting a language fully on a variety of non-Apple platforms is a massive undertaking. Even assuming for the sake of argument, unlimited funding, there's still the issue of finding the right talent, as well as expending limited managerial bandwidth for oversight & prioritization. I think the Linux support that already exists is an awesome start. But the only realistic way to see more from Apple on this is if they themselves start to deploy critical Swift web-services on their own backend infra. (I'm assuming here that they run Linux systems somewhere in their stack.) That will give them the incentive to take it to the next level. Until then it's largely left to the community to find the energy and time to do this.

pjmlp 6y ago
Apparently Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Azul, Mozilla managed to do it. Apple has enough in the bank to do it as well.