Re:Network.framework: A modern alternative to sockets
by josephg on Saturday June 09, 2018 @05:46AM
(#17272255)
> But I would certainly be more enthusiastic if any effort was presented to make it cross-platform and, hopefully, open-source and/or standardized.
They opensourced libdispatch[1] and ported it to linux, so there's hope they might do the same with Network.framework. It would be time consuming, but it shouldn't be hard for someone in the opensource community to write a linux / BSD implementation of this stuff on top of posix sockets & libdispatch.
I suspect the reason they didn't opensource it is that it looks like it was designed mostly with phone apps in mind, not servers. And thats a shame - it looks like it would be a great addition to the swift server story, especially given it does user-space networking out of the box. I still prefer swift's ergonomics over rust for application development, and this would help immensely. (Rust is steadily closing that gap though, what with native wasm support and async/await on their way.)
They opensourced libdispatch[1] and ported it to linux, so there's hope they might do the same with Network.framework. It would be time consuming, but it shouldn't be hard for someone in the opensource community to write a linux / BSD implementation of this stuff on top of posix sockets & libdispatch.
I suspect the reason they didn't opensource it is that it looks like it was designed mostly with phone apps in mind, not servers. And thats a shame - it looks like it would be a great addition to the swift server story, especially given it does user-space networking out of the box. I still prefer swift's ergonomics over rust for application development, and this would help immensely. (Rust is steadily closing that gap though, what with native wasm support and async/await on their way.)
[1] https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-libdispatch