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Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

(www.swift.org)
612 points dayanruben | 3 comments | 01 Feb 25 16:44 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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sgt ◴[01 Feb 25 17:04 UTC] No.42899856[source]▶
Is Swift actually serious about embedded?
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dlachausse ◴[01 Feb 25 17:13 UTC] No.42899953[source]▶
Yes, there was an entire WWDC ‘24 talk about it…

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2024/10197

Swift is a great language, but it is unfortunately still held back by the stigma of being perceived as only usable on Apple platforms.

replies(1): >>42899998 #
o11c ◴[01 Feb 25 17:17 UTC] No.42899998[source]▶
And until packages are actually shipped for all mainstream distros, the stigma is completely accurate.

No, neither "just install a tarball" nor "just install this docker image" count.

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jitl ◴[01 Feb 25 17:32 UTC] No.42900144[source]▶
Distro packaging for programming language ecosystems is so often hopelessly out of date. I’ve never used a distro toolchain or packages to build production software for any language Python’s age or younger.

Outside of C/C++/Fortran pretty much every project I see on Github prefers things like Rustup or Nix for toolchains to navigate around Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL’s “stability” approach.

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o11c ◴[01 Feb 25 17:44 UTC] No.42900266[source]▶
I disagree vehemently. For any active language, distro packages should be at most 3 years old.

And for any language that's stable enough to be worth using, "3 years old" is good enough.

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1. AlotOfReading ◴[01 Feb 25 20:08 UTC] No.42901732[source]▶
Both GCC and Clang have shipped support for major updates to C and C++ within the last 3 years. If C and C++ aren't stable enough, what is?
replies(1): >>42903175 #
2. o11c ◴[01 Feb 25 22:37 UTC] No.42903175[source]▶
And is there any actual need to use those right now? No.

I lived through the C++11 transition (which was the only actually significant improvement C++ has ever had), and as much as GCC 4.6 was enticing, it really wasn't a burden to keep supporting GCC 4.4 in stable software. Only for ground-breaking development (which takes long enough to stabilize that stable distros will have the new GCC) is it worth starting to use the new features unconditionally.

Now, C++ does have a much better source-level compatibility story than most languages (e.g. `#if ... #define constexpr /* compiler too old */`), but that just means that newer languages have no excuse for refusing to learn from its successes.

replies(1): >>42903775 #
3. AlotOfReading ◴[01 Feb 25 23:41 UTC] No.42903775[source]▶
I just picked a random, notable feature (std::format) and the LTS my systems are currently on (22.04). The current Clang in universe is 14, which doesn't have a complete std::format implementation. That's one of the most popular features from a 5 year old language standard that many people are using today and yet it's still not available on a common LTS version without adding the LLVM repos.