Apple Open-Sources Swift System, Adds Linux Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apple Open-Sources Swift System, Adds Linux Support

Earlier this year Apple engineers announced Swift System as their new library for low-level system interfaces. They have now open-sourced Swift System while also introducing Linux support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Swift-System-Open-Source-Linux

[wswartzendruber]

I really have had too much alcohol. This cannot be the case.

[Ironmask]

I'm legitimately curious if anyone is ever going to use this. As far as I can tell[1], Swift is just "a better replacement for Objective-C", I don't see any compelling or innovative features about it at all, and I love getting hyped over new languages. It actually feels kind of like a missed opportunity; just kind of a waste, really.

[1] Just from a general glance over the language. Every time I tried to look up anything about Swift's features, all I got were general introductions to programming, which started feeling insulting, like the language community was treating me like a baby instead of just someone who was interested in a new language.

[jrch2k8]

This is actually very nice, the syntax is really nice and if they can somehow wire up SwiftUI to gtk3, it would be a killer option for Linux.

[Ironmask]

This is actually very nice, the syntax is really nice and if they can somehow wire up SwiftUI to gtk3, it would be a killer option for Linux.

Oh I don't doubt it's a nice language, it certainly looks it. It's just, we have all these new languages that offer some kind of new feature to really help you out with things like resource management or parallelism and whatnot, but I don't see anything about that in Swift, at least, it sure doesn't advertise anything like Rust does.

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

This is actually very nice, the syntax is really nice and if they can somehow wire up SwiftUI to gtk3, it would be a killer option for Linux.

If we go by their opengl history,
they will make a swift2 and then pull the rug out from under your feet and say no other platforms except mac. Be careful when stepping.

[jrch2k8]

Oh I don't doubt it's a nice language, it certainly looks it. It's just, we have all these new languages that offer some kind of new feature to really help you out with things like resource management or parallelism and whatnot, but I don't see anything about that in Swift, at least, it sure doesn't advertise anything like Rust does.

mmm, as a language is nothing too special compared to Rust but it have 2 very strong points:

1.) Unlike Rust the syntax is kinda nice and kinda fluid, so it has more chance to attract more developers.

2.) Is the go to Language for Apple development this days which translate in a huge market share of developers(hate it or love it, Apple store is a huge money maker), so if the language can provide all the niceties of Apple(like SwiftUI) in Linux equivalents whereas possible it should make very trivial to port Apple apps to Linux as well which can open very interesting opportunities for other projects.

[jrch2k8]

If we go by their opengl history,
they will make a swift2 and then pull the rug out from under your feet and say no other platforms except mac. Be careful when stepping.

Technically this would be based on Swift 5 if it is up to par with Apple latest version 5.3

[re:fi.64]

I'm legitimately curious if anyone is ever going to use this. As far as I can tell[1], Swift is just "a better replacement for Objective-C", I don't see any compelling or innovative features about it at all, and I love getting hyped over new languages. It actually feels kind of like a missed opportunity; just kind of a waste, really.

[1] Just from a general glance over the language. Every time I tried to look up anything about Swift's features, all I got were general introductions to programming, which started feeling insulting, like the language community was treating me like a baby instead of just someone who was interested in a new language.

Check out the language tour in the docs: https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/Gu...uidedTour.html

It's a pretty fast overview of the language, and the other pages of the "Swift book" go into much greater detail, but it's definitely not targeting new devs. I'd imagine much of the reason you find a lot of beginner material is just that it's the language of choice for writing lOS apps in particular, which is something that attracts many new devs.

If I had to describe the language, it'd probably be as one of the most interesting mixes of OOP and FP I've seen. It's initially very much a language built on traditional classes, but then they add on tagged unions, pattern matching, type inference, and elegant error handling. If you've ever used Kotlin before, that's the closest sibling I can think of, but with less reflection (this is more of a JVM thing really) and even more FP support + a nice error handling twist that's like exception tracking but it's actually sane.

[cl333r]

This is actually very nice, the syntax is really nice and if they can somehow wire up SwiftUI to gtk3, it would be a killer option for Linux.

Not as long as Swift is much slower and more memory hungry than both C++ and Rust.

Swift vs Rust: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.de...wift-rust.html
Swift vs C++: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.de...swift-gpp.html

One would say "give it time", no, it's been around since 2016 and is already at version 5.3.