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I’ve had very few complaints with Swift as a backend language in all honesty. I can see it as a backend/systems language. It is not a scripting language. The

by urthor 5y ago

I’ve had very few complaints with Swift as a backend language in all honesty. I can see it as a backend/systems language. It is not a scripting language. The issue is the stewardship of the ecosystem. The fact the Foundation library is closed source is a complete joke in this day and age. Apple’s lack of effort towards fostering a broader community for its language is a comedy of errors. A Swift developer will spend much time dealing with undocumented closed source packages. It’s almost comedic how retro it is. It’s like coding in the 1980s.

adamnemecek 5y ago
> The fact the Foundation library is closed source is a complete joke in this day and age. Foundation is open source https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation
andrewjl 5y ago
The Foundation library on non-Apple platforms is open source: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation and intended to reach parity with the Apple version. > Our primary goal is to achieve implementation parity with Foundation on Apple platforms. This will help to enable the overall Swift goal of portability.
- lolinder 5y ago
  But why are these even two separate libraries? Is it normal for different platforms to have different implementations of the standard library? I'd assumed that most of the library would have been written in Swift itself, which should theoretically make it be as platform-independent as Swift is.
  - olliej 5y ago
    This is assumption from first principles The Apple versions of foundation have to be compatible with the Foundation/CoreFoundation equivalents. They also have more than a decade of binary compat to maintain
  - andrewjl 5y ago
    Foundation is not the standard library of Swift. Swift has its own standard library that is bundled with the language on all platforms that are supported. And Foundation itself isn't written in Swift, a good portion is written in C. > A significant portion of the implementation of Foundation on Apple platforms is provided by another framework called CoreFoundation (a.k.a. CF). CF is written primarily in C and is very portable. Therefore we have chosen to use it for the internal implementation of Swift Foundation where possible. As CF is present on all platforms, we can use it to provide a common implementation everywhere. https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/main/Docs/Design.md#portability https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/main...
jollybean 5y ago
If it were extremely well documented with a lot of nice examples the open/closed nature of the libs would be a secondary question.

by urthor 5y ago

adamnemecek 5y ago

> The fact the Foundation library is closed source is a complete joke in this day and age. Foundation is open source https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation

andrewjl 5y ago

The Foundation library on non-Apple platforms is open source: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation and intended to reach parity with the Apple version. > Our primary goal is to achieve implementation parity with Foundation on Apple platforms. This will help to enable the overall Swift goal of portability.

lolinder 5y ago
But why are these even two separate libraries? Is it normal for different platforms to have different implementations of the standard library? I'd assumed that most of the library would have been written in Swift itself, which should theoretically make it be as platform-independent as Swift is.
- olliej 5y ago
  This is assumption from first principles The Apple versions of foundation have to be compatible with the Foundation/CoreFoundation equivalents. They also have more than a decade of binary compat to maintain
- andrewjl 5y ago
  Foundation is not the standard library of Swift. Swift has its own standard library that is bundled with the language on all platforms that are supported. And Foundation itself isn't written in Swift, a good portion is written in C. > A significant portion of the implementation of Foundation on Apple platforms is provided by another framework called CoreFoundation (a.k.a. CF). CF is written primarily in C and is very portable. Therefore we have chosen to use it for the internal implementation of Swift Foundation where possible. As CF is present on all platforms, we can use it to provide a common implementation everywhere. https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/main/Docs/Design.md#portability https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/main...

jollybean 5y ago

If it were extremely well documented with a lot of nice examples the open/closed nature of the libs would be a secondary question.