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A comment on Interoperability: Swift’s Super Power. Parent comment

Re:Interoperability: Swift’s Super Power by jamil7 on Friday September 22, 2023 @07:25AM (#37610593)
I feel like the problem with Swift in this context is its relationship with Foundation, its standard library. There are at least three versions of it now. The internal version that ships with Apple OSes, then are the forks swift-corelibs-foundation and swift-foundation, these are, as far as I know, incomplete or behave slightly differently on Linux.

swift-foundation is the newest and most likely the future. However, it's unclear when or if it will ever be production ready. Apple doesn't appear to be dedicating that much engineering effort towards it right now.

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Re:Interoperability: Swift’s Super Power by mplewis9z on Friday September 22, 2023 @09:14AM (#37611610)
Eh, I wouldn’t call Foundation its standard library - it sits somewhere in between your traditional stdlib (including things like Date/Time models) and third-party dependencies (things like networking requests). There’s no functionality in Foundation that is absolutely core to the language and that you can’t avoid.

I agree with you the various forks are confusing, but disagree that Apple isn’t putting effort towards the new one - it was only announced earlier this year, and is looking like it will be ready for WWDC is 2024. Which, given the sheer scope of the project (completely rewriting everything from the ground up in Swift), would be quite a fast turnaround time.

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Re:Interoperability: Swift’s Super Power by jamil7 on Friday September 22, 2023 @09:42AM (#37611966)
> There’s no functionality in Foundation that is absolutely core to the language and that you can’t avoid.

Is that why they're splitting the newer one into further SPM modules? There seems to be "FoundationEssentials" listed in that package.

> but disagree that Apple isn’t putting effort towards the new one - it was only announced earlier this year, and is looking like it will be ready for WWDC is 2024

Oh, interesting, where did you find this information? I follow the project on Github and got the impression it had slowed down since its announcement.

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Re:Interoperability: Swift’s Super Power by fauigerzigerk on Friday September 22, 2023 @10:00AM (#37612174)
>Eh, I wouldn’t call Foundation its standard library...

You're absolutely right, because the Swift Standard Library is a separate thing. It contains only the absolute essentials such as Int, String or Array:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift/swift-standa...

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