The fact that Apple provides all these incredible platform specific frameworks and libraries for graphics, audio, games, GPU kernel programming, and more, it’s just the icing.
How exactly are protocols a Swift "upgrade" to OO programming? They were in Objective-C since the mid 90s, adopted by Java as interfaces, copied by C# etc.
Also, protocols in Swift have a huge performance downside, because they decided to have them work across structs and classes: if you use a protocol in a function argument, the compiler doesn't even know the size of the argument at compile time, so copying the arguments has to be dynamically dispatched unless the compiler can figure it out in an extra optimisation pass...that's not possible when doing separate compilation.
> Runs reasonably fast, on par with Go or Java.
A downgrade...particularly considering the epic compile times.
> named parameters
Also there since the 80s, in a less weird way.
https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/06/the-curious-case-of-swif...
> ...professionally used about half a dozen languages ...
What languages were those, if I may ask?
Having to deal with weakself, no reference cycles, very limited closures, having to deal with Xcode, no integration with any other IDE because Apple Apples, debatable generics, SPM, debatable cross platform abilities, fucking Tasks and Actors, SwiftUI being locked to versions of Swift, extremely limited community, few high quality open source libraries for something that only performs as well as Java is quite the hard sell.
For that price, you could also get Kotlin which fixes most of Java's problems and provides access to all the JVM as well as Kotlin/Native, with top tier DSL abilities and a really well thought out stdlib, coroutines, reified funs and much more.
2016: https://9to5mac.com/2016/02/22/ibm-swift-cloud-kitura/
2016: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/swift-server/
2020: https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/01/ibm-stop-work-swift-serve...
You can run it in docker: https://hub.docker.com/_/swift
for now
just saw an article about IBM deleting most of their website because its a mess. It was some linkedin developer's post.
It is the most similar in terms of language features and style but it has access to Java's unparalleled library and tooling ecosystem.
The standard library is becoming cross-platform as we discuss it here.
Is it just that the maintenance cost is not worth it? Or would it threaten its ecosystem in a way that I don't understand?
It would seem that making Swift cross-platform would make Apple's ecosystem more accessible to developers. The barrier to entry would be lower if developers only needed to learn the APIs and not a whole new language and its tooling too. This would help the ecosystem stay healthy for a longer time.
It was JetBrains pet project to fix archaic stuff in Java without making a Scala. It was designed from the get go for a wide base (as wide as java).
I'm not sure how it became Android's main target, but I doubt it was the original purpose.
i think kotlin has more use outside compared to swift.
But a language has to start somewhere, so i wouldn't hold it against swift. It's a fairly well done language regardless, and nothing apple specific about it tbh (which are all just libraries).
It's like Rust in that it offers memory safety by default without a big performance hit.
You might be surprised (I was). Most of the benchmarks I’ve seen place it more in the neighborhood of golang and v8, rather than the C, C++, rust neighborhood you might expect.
Another commenter in this thread highlighted that the ref-counting GC is what keeps it out of the C / Rust performance neighborhood.
[0] https://arc.net/
It took real effort from Microsoft into the Open Source space to make it more widely popular. Far away from Java or JavaScript, but I see many similarities between the development and evolution of Swift and C#.
Almost everything starts as a domain specific language. Same goes for JavaScript. First browser only, then through Node, suddenly JavaScript everywhere.
Python gained massive traction through Jupyter. Before that, I found Python a clumsy alternative to JavaScript. Since then I have changed my mind. ;)
I tried Swift for Linux, and soon realized it was a meh experience (NS this, NS that... NextStep is still there) and switched back to Rust.
It could have been a strong Rust alternative.
“No one”
Yet The Browser Company (The one that is hyping the Arc Browser) is writing their browser in Swift to support Windows. [0] which that is their main product.
The Browser Company is not “No one”.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa_fNuaSE_I
EDIT: So this video doesn't show someone choosing Swift outside of Apple and using on a different platform (Windows) and doesn't disprove the claim of "No one outside Apple chooses Swift"?
Surely you can do better than some of the very low effort replies below.
iOS/macOS devs use Swift on other platforms because it's the only language they know, yeepidodadey. Ignore the fact that 99% of their project is cinterop with Chromium
It's valuable to Apple to have a language perfectly tuned to their stack, as the official entrypoint to all their APIs. If you need to use those APIs, you're excited about Swift. If you don't, you aren't
Many people are more than happy to do all their career on a specific platform.
And not at all compatible or easily bridgeable with obj-c, which was not optional.
Swift for example defaults to copyable value types and reference types that are refcounted because that is what is most often needed for evented application code, while Rust defaults to non-copyable objects (with wrappers for things like reference counting) because of its systems development focus.
Swift also had a hard requirement of a decade of co-existance with Objective-C. A significant number of Swift types toll-free bridge with objc (and corefoundation) alternatives, and that had a considerable impact on the standard library. Their base library would be different from Rust's "std" due to needing different implementations of strings, vectors, dicts and so on.
The two do take quite a bit of inspiration from one another, and will gradually grow to support an ever-larger overlapping set of use cases, but the design constraints of the existing language will still mean that one or the other is better for a specific task.
That's like...Apple's whole deal. Proprietary everything top-to-bottom.
The decline in the docs is due to a number of factors, but I would say mainly it's (1) the relentless annual major OS update schedule, (2) the proliferation of OS (macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, xrOS?), (3) the dual language stack, (4) Apple personnel turnover.
I do quite like Swift overall -- it’s usually terser than Obj-C and I like the much stricter and more expressive type system. But you pay for that with much longer compile times, and the tooling feels much the same (Xcode is still Xcode).
It's a modern statically compiled language with complex generics, that supports providing a generic interfaces in libraries with retaining ABI compatibility. Which no other modern "system" language supports. That's fairly technically interesting to me.
> We have so much more than that and you just went with reference counting
Like what?
The options for memory safe shared ownership are refcounting or GC.
Assuming you're talking about rust, that's just C++: object lifetime is lexical, and if you need it to last longer you have to use Arc/Rc/shared_ptr. The purpose of the lifetime and borrow checkers is to ensure exclusive access, and reduce the copy/destruction churn that you get from the C++ model (a hypothetical C++ that only allows the use of unique_ptr instead of raw pointers - obviously C++'s type system and approach to memory safety is not a Good Thing).
But it's important to realize rust did not create a new solution to object lifetime management for shared objects.
It's also important to realize that rust was designed in an environment where there was no existing code to interoperate with, whereas Swift was designed to work with the existing Darwin APIs and objective-c which are all refcounted. So even if no refcounting was the goal you'd end up with a new language, designed for a specific environment, and the default behaviour would not be correct.
Now that the language is more established, and it's less critical for every part of the language to have objc interop they are working on pure ownership semantics, for the same reason as rust: it saves copies without requiring a refcount[1]
[1] https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/OwnershipManif...
I think that Foundation being a Obj-C library effectively forced Apple into eating their own dog food (for the sorely needed Swift/Obj-C interop), so I don’t think rewriting Foundation in Swift would have been a good strategy for Apple.
9 years is not that long for a programming language. PG's (in)famous eassy on Python Paradox [1] was written in 2004. By the time Python was 13 years old and it was still a "cool kid's language".
As for Foundation, core frameworks almost never get rewritten and for good reason. It's almost never worth it. Best case? You get functional equivalence. Worst case? You introduce bugs into something that millions or even billions of devices depend on. Those bugfixes may take many years. Every now and again we see bugfixes that are 10-20+ years old in things like GCC or the Linux kernel.
Rewrites should never be undertaken lightly, particularly with less mature languages. Apple is (IMHO) being relatively aggressive with this.
And all the money in world can't make it any faster.
Also, this project's been going for a few years I think, since it's used for Swift on Linux.
That doesn't seem accurate:
"The Foundation package is an independent project in its early incubation stages."
"In the future, we will explore how to sunset the existing swift-corelibs-foundation and migrate to using the new version of Foundation created by this project."
Gross. The whole appeal of Foundation was having this incredibly convenient, beautiful, high-level object-oriented API ontop of low-level, statically compiled performant C...
The true path forward for computing is clearly an alliance among the holy trinity of god's C languages: C, C++, and Objective-C.
Yes, the future is in Objective-C++'s hands.
Objective-C got good enough that all processes on Apple platforms have the objc runtime in their address space whether they want it or not and many pure C or CF-like frameworks are built on ObjC under the covers.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.next.advocacy/c/uOQnC1x...
The objections to Objective-C at Apple were always political, not technical, with a very entrenched "no Objective-C, ever" faction. Took a quarter of a century, but it looks like they finally won.
But hey, maybe having a core, foundational framework written in the most performant language out there with the most hardware support should've been a priority. ;)
Very soon it will not be possible to publish an app on iOS not built with the house language.
For those who don’t know, using C/C++ and opengl was easily done on iOS for many years, as llvm/clang was the official compiler.
The question is very simple: Swift is meant to be a safe language, how feasible is that if a large chunk of the core types and runtime are implemented in C, C++, and Objective-C/C++? Migrating to Swift is the obvious and sensible step, unless you propose re-implementing them in yet another language?
[1] https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/CppInteroperab...
I have a bad feeling about this.
Swift heavily relies on LLVM. As long as you have LLVM IR, your support isn’t going anywhere. Not to mention Apple continues to be an outsized contributor to LLVM and clang (largely because they started and open sourced the projects)
"The LLVM project started in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, under the direction of Vikram Adve and Chris Lattner. LLVM was originally developed as a research infrastructure to investigate dynamic compilation techniques for static and dynamic programming languages. LLVM was released under the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License,[3] a permissive free software licence. In 2005, Apple Inc. hired Lattner and formed a team to work on the LLVM system for various uses within Apple's development systems."
Its not like I dislike the language either but I think compile times matter so languages should not pretend like that doesn't exist. I can forgive Rust its giving you more than just type checking but Swift does not offer the same things yet it takes just as long or longer to compile.
I sure hope the author learned the right lesson from the failure that is Swift and Mojo turns out to be better. I do not want a language with a complicated type system and long compile times. I want a 'good enough' type system and fast compile times.
New in 2023 is instead NOT to match all of Foundation, but to make some core libraries that make Swift usable on many platforms. E.g., they broke out the very large internationalization/i18n tables required for unicode support into a separate module.
It's very unlikely Apple would move off their own Foundation, which is well-understood and well-tested. This strategy permits them to incrementally sidle over, but continue with both for some time. Aside from servers, it's likely to look promising for multiple tiny devices - trusted computing, watches, headsets, airpods, etc.
:(
I really like the verbosity of Objective-C - this makes the code more readable and easier to understand, even (or especially) when reading a program the first time.
Being a superset of C (and C++ with Objective-C++) means that, when necessary, one can easily write a C (or C++) method (or class) but also include existing C/C++ libraries.
I also find some of the improvements Swift brings to actually make developers more reckless and dependent on the language/compiler (yes, I liked to manually manage memory).
And a bit of a personal frustration: I find a swift package/project that I want to use, download it and ...start fixing/updating the code, so that it compiles with the latest Swift version. I still have Objective-C code I wrote more than 10 years ago that compiles and runs with minimal or no change.
I think for sure you're in the minority here. Swift was really a breath of fresh air for my iOS dev work -- it's just so modern and easy to read. That said -- I'm still reluctant on SwiftUI though. Seems like one of those technologies that works great for small apps and tutorials but falls apart at scale but admittedly have little experience with it so perhaps I'd be wise to reserve judgement.
I think you are in the minority there, even among Objective-C programmers.
In any case, Objective-C ARC is there for those who want it.
I believe Swift takes the switch farther than match in Rust, because it tries to deal with API stability (e.g. a system library adding new possible cases)
Current Apple and Swift felt somewhat like Apple and Dylan in the 90s.
May be time could tell. A lot of people hate Objective-C, and was cheering for Swift in 2014. Now nearly a decade later, it seems time and resources could have been spent somewhere else.
Metal is the only green field framework that was still being built with Objective-C, and yet most just use the Swift bindings.
Maybe Swift isn't Objective-C without C, as originally announced, but something else isn't coming to replace it either.
How about going forward to an alternative that actually isn't a step back.
Seriously if you're going to take the cost of rewriting massive amounts of code, why would you not rewrite it in a language that offers actual improvements to the language that's being rewritten?
Apple already has (and uses) objective-c++, and the majority of objc I've ever interacted with is objc++ once you're outside of headers (just look for .mm extensions).
Mostly at slowing down iOS runtime performance per clock cycle, and increasing compilation times.
Its also been hugely successful at punishing companies for using it, since it didnt really work for a few versions.
While there have been fewer crashes (sort of) due to the switch, as someone who worked for years in Objective C and years in Swift, I honestly never felt that Swift significantly improved much except allocation rituals and properties.
I do however enjoy Kotlin for the backend because it has some nicer semantics for object construction.
While I do admire the work that Apple has put into Swift, I really felt that Apple was trying to "impress everyone", with a whole lot of bikeshedding and sick amoutns of code generation to convince us it was the right thing to do.
Frankly, apps run over 10 times faster in obj C and xcode with Swift is probably my least favorite and sort of non-ergonomic experience close to DOS batch file dev in Windows Notepad.
I wonder if the current state of affairs is what Chris L had in mind?
I'd love to see a comparison of how the functions work within their own realm, e.g.:
- Speed of a date function in pure ObjC, tested in ObjC realm with no Swift bridge
- Speed of the same date function in pure Swift, tested in Swift realm with no ObjC bridge.
Otherwise, introducing an extra bridge with the language, then getting rid of it isn't a performance improvement, it's getting back to the baseline.
This is a strange comment, because Swift would have been Dead On Arrival in 2014 without that Objective-C bridging, an Apple-created language that doesn't work with Apple application frameworks.
The bridge should have obviously existed (and should still exist for a very long foreseeable future if not forever). I was refering to having a benchmark with and without bridge and telling Swift is faster is a bit off, as that performance decrease was what Swift had to bring in the first place.
Which Apple acquired years ago and then released it open source.
How big is Foundation anyway? Or are we talking about the movie they released?
This makes a lot of sense considering swift's primary target: app developers that build end-user facing software, as opposed to core system developers for rust.
