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Discussion Sentiment

79% Positive

Analyzed from 1025 words in the discussion.

Trending Topics

#swift#apple#developer#linux#open#source#more#lot#rust#great

Discussion (41 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ChrisMarshallNY•1 minute ago
Glad to see it.

I like the SPM, but it definitely has its "rough edges."

Having an index like this, is great.

However, I guarantee that there will be some caterwaulin', if Apple decides to regulate which packages get indexed (which I think should happen, as it's now an official Apple brand).

dragon-hn•about 2 hours ago
I guess that explains why Dave Verwer handed off ownership of the iOS Dev Weekly newsletter.

Always great to see community members see success.

lsllc•about 2 hours ago
Yes, congrats to Dave on two successes!
daveverwer•about 1 hour ago
Thank you both!
frou_dh•about 3 hours ago
Back when I was following Swift, I was a bit confused by there being 2 distinct sites that seemed to be pretty much the same thing:

- https://swiftpackageregistry.com

- https://swiftpackageindex.com

peterspath•about 3 hours ago
Well I was thinking about making a competitor to SPI because they only support GitHub repo’s.

This news makes it easy. I’m starting the engines on this…

unfunco•about 3 hours ago
Working on an idea after it has been Sherlocked is a bold choice.
nish__•about 3 hours ago
What does Sherlocked mean?
julianozen•about 3 hours ago
It means Apple (or big tech) has adopted/cloned your product basically killing your products ability to succeed

In reference to when Apple created a project called Sherlock that was a direct copy of a popular Mac app Watson

doodpants•about 3 hours ago
xd1936•about 3 hours ago
It's a reference to Sherlock (and later Spotlight) being added to macOS, rendering the previous third-party search-launcher tools obsolete.
rahkiin•about 3 hours ago
Or send in a PR for gitlab/… support?
peterspath•about 3 hours ago
They did not want that and discouraged it.
daveverwer•about 1 hour ago
This is a genuinely interesting topic, and as we say in the blog post:

> Together, we’re building a comprehensive package registry to serve the Swift community’s evolving needs.

The great thing about a registry is that it doesn't care where the original source is hosted. We will be moving away from that model completely as we work towards this.

bigyabai•about 2 hours ago
Merging a PR with Apple is harder than merging into the left side of a six-lane highway during rush hour.
rescripting•about 2 hours ago
Is it? What's difficult about it? I see PRs from contributors outside Apple all the time in https://github.com/swiftlang/
trollbridge•about 2 hours ago
Please get in touch, as I've wanted this to support Gitlab (et al) for a while, and I'm nervous about the future of SPI now.
jshier•about 3 hours ago
Not optimistic here. While I'm glad the SPI guys are getting paid (that is, a full time job), Apple is pretty bad at open source and developer services both, and they explicitly call out developer identity as a future direction, which doesn't fill me with hope.
RobMurray•about 1 hour ago
I tried to get a personal developer account (I'm already a developer through an organisation). The app required a Driver's license as the only accepted ID. I don't drive because I'm blind. They did a screen share and talked me through applying on the web site. It failed. They never gave a reason and ignored me when I asked for one. They just said

"Hello Robert, Thank you for your patience while I awaited a response from our operations team.

Upon review, we have found that we can’t verify your identity with the Apple Developer app or provide further assistance with the Apple Account for Apple developer programs.

You can still take advantage of great content using your Apple Account in Xcode to develop and test apps on your own device. Learn more about Xcode development.

I do apologise that I was not of more help to you in this situation but wish you the best of luck for the future. "

They will destroy the developer experience when they add identity and signing.

marcelox86•about 3 hours ago
I see the opposite, they have a lot of oss projects nowadays and most of their new, interesting stuff is getting open sourced too, a la Microsoft
jshier•about 3 hours ago
Simply being open doesn't make them good open source projects. Luckily the SPI shouldn't need to conform to Apple's release schedule, and should operate mostly independently, so the worst aspects of Apple's open source projects will be less of an issue.
y1n0•about 3 hours ago
No true Scotsman…
SoKamil•about 3 hours ago
This acquisition sounds like a sign that Apple wants to get better on that front.
jshier•about 3 hours ago
That's a pretty low bar, and doesn't necessarily mean "good".
MBCook•about 1 hour ago
That’s right. Whenever a company does something that seems good let’s just start being mean.

If they’ve ever done something we don’t like we’re not allowed to celebrate anything.

Might send the wrong message.

aaronvg•about 2 hours ago
kind of surprised Swift didn't launch with this by default, built in-house
eddythompson80•about 2 hours ago
Apple has something with Swift similar to what Google has with Go. The language has a lot of desirable features for server development very much like Go and Rust. Especially when compared to Java and C#.

It makes sense for them to build their services using Swift instead of something like Go and the Swift-on-server team has been doing a lot of work to get swift in a usable state on Linux. Having a thriving opensource (starting with a package index) makes a lot of sense to them for that.

My only problem with Swift is personal taste and experience. I tried it on linux few times (admittingly few years ago now) and generally I wasn't a fan. Go and Rust solve all the problems that Swift could have solved for me, so I didn't bother. But just like node got an entire class of developers into server side programming, Swift could be apples approach to get their iOS and MacOS developers a way to easily write server side code in swift as well

frizlab•about 2 hours ago
Swift on Linux has changed since a few years ago. A lot.

I prefer Swift over rust as it has the same memory-safety guarantees with a much more approachable syntax, and is generally easier to work with.

hocuspocus•about 2 hours ago
Easy and approachable sound pretty subjective to say the least; feature and syntax wise, Swift has become an absolute monster of a language. Rust's tooling and ecosystem are ahead and these points matter to me more than the raw syntax in the age of LLMs.
frizlab•about 1 hour ago
As per my experience, the learning curve of Swift is easier than rust’s. Yes, obviously, it’s subjective. Yes, if you want to do complex things in Swift (e.g. generic packs), the syntax is more complex, but that’s not needed every day.

As per the tooling, idk enough to report on that.

As per the LLMs remark, I do not use that at all, still, and hopefully never will, though I already know I won’t have the choice at some point, sadly.

tialaramex•about 2 hours ago
The same condition is still true as the first time I was told "Swift on Linux" is somehow a first class experience:

> Documentation for the standard library is presently hosted on the Apple Developer website.

Sure enough, by Apple policy, the documentation pretends no non-Apple platforms exist. What happens for an API which could be different if your system isn't fruit-flavoured? They don't care and won't talk about it.

Is the feature I need available for this Linux device? No idea, but it does work with watchOS and tvOS made by Apple...

frizlab•about 1 hour ago
> Is the feature I need available for this Linux device?

If it’s in Foundation, yes. Swift 6 on Apple OSes now (since a while ago actually) uses the same open-source foundation as Linux. If it’s a proprietary framework (e.g. TabularData), no. It’s simple.

For the rest, almost all Swift packages developed by Apple are fully compatible with Linux, and the documentation of said packages is usually explicit wrt. platform specifics, AFAIK.

dhosek•43 minutes ago
Isn’t there a performance cost though with runtime binding of functions? (I’ve not looked too closely at Swift since the first couple of years when Objective C compatibility was essential, so maybe that’s less of a default than it was in the early days).
anextio•28 minutes ago
Runtime binding only occurs for Objective-C interop.

Swift functions are bound at compile time when statically known. Dynamic dispatch is done through vtables for native Swift classes, and through witness tables for protocol existentials.