Re:Swift 5 Release Notes for Xcode 10.2
by dlivingston on Monday March 25, 2019 @06:31PM
(#19487353)
Very cool. App thinning seems to be the golden feature of Swift 5. I am dying for the day (if it ever comes) that UIKit and SpriteKit work natively with Linux and Windows frameworks, so that I can finally make Swift a daily driver.
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Yeah, UIKit and SpriteKit will never come to other platforms. They constitute part of iOS' and macOS' competitive advantage.
Swift's progress also has little to bear on that front as UIKit and SpriteKit are written in C, Objective-C, and C++; their use in Swift depends on Apple's Objective-C runtime which is not released as part of the non-macOS/iOS port of Swift for Linux.
To be fair, libobjc is open-source: https://opensource.apple.com/source/objc4/objc4-750.1/
That is a very tiny part of Objective-C story.
Indeed. I don't think Apple would open source Foundation, App Kit, UI Kit, and a bunch of other things; that by itself precludes inclusion with Swift. Aside from that, a lot of those things rely on the full version of Core Foundation in C; I think the (open source, non-Swift) implementation of Core Foundation, CF Lite, is heavily reduced compared to what ships with Apple's OSs and would make an ineffective base for redundantly reimplementing those frameworks on other systems.
ABI stability on Darwin is the big feature. That enables the Swift runtime + standard libraries to ship in the OS, which enables app thinning to strip them from apps going forward.
So faster load times and smaller app bundles!