swift-corelibs-foundation VS ponyc

a : https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/main...

I wouldn't want to be the guy relying on this table advancement for this project. The fact that they're rewriting it in pure swift probably says a lot about the quality of the current approach.

b: makes absolutely no difference from a developer perspective. if you want to run threads in swift you're going to use gcd.

c: my take with all apple software tech has been to wait until they've dogfooded their own tech long enough to make it useable. Worked very well for me so far, thank you very much.

Correction: rewrite of PARTS of Foundation

There already was an open-source project to rewrite ALL of foundation, but it had stalled on the shores of having to re-implement everything:

  https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation

The (shitty) old Linux implementation has been on GitHub for years.

Sigh... The traditional argument is that every dependency is of the same quality and trustworthiness of the language Standard Library.

If I use the SL, then I should also have no problem using some lashed-up chimera that has a dependency hierarchy that spans three continents.

Like I said, I'll do things my way.

For the record, here's a peek at some of the "worthless" packages that I use in my own work: https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware

Also, for the record, here's the Swift Foundation Library: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation

It has plenty of open issues: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/issues

If every dependency chain can match these, yhen I'll be open to considering them.

As it is, I do use the occasional external package, but I'm picky.

CoreFoundation is (partially?) open-source and cross-platform now: https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation

Partly this is doable because although RFC 2616 specifies a max URL length of 2048 bytes, most browsers allow much longer, with Chrome and Firefox allowing at least 64k chars (that's what they'll display but it seems like more is happily processed), while Safari allows URL strings up to 2GB in size[1]!

[1] https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/b23d...

Regarding your point #3, Swift does indeed have an open-source cross-platform implementation of Foundation. swift-corelibs-foundation

Foundation is open source and (mostly) works on Linux. What else do you want to see “opened up?”

Foundation is not the standard library of Swift. Swift has its own standard library that is bundled with the language on all platforms that are supported.

And Foundation itself isn't written in Swift, a good portion is written in C.

> A significant portion of the implementation of Foundation on Apple platforms is provided by another framework called CoreFoundation (a.k.a. CF). CF is written primarily in C and is very portable. Therefore we have chosen to use it for the internal implementation of Swift Foundation where possible. As CF is present on all platforms, we can use it to provide a common implementation everywhere.

https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/main...

For example, the actor's model is not used by a lot of languages, Pony (https://www.ponylang.io/) and Elixir are the only ones that I know, but they address the concurrency problem quite well, while it's a pain to deal with in other languages at large scale.

And that last point is critical. If the language flatly can't represent some concepts it uses, they have to be implemented somewhere else. I had a similar discussion with a proponent for Pony once- the language itself is 100% safe, and fully dependent on C for its runtime and data structures. One of Rust's core strengths is being able to express unsafe concepts, meaning the unsafe code can expose a safe interface that accurately describes its requirements rather than an opaque C ABI. Vale doesn't seem to do that.

"Exterior iteration. Iteration used to be by stack / non-escaping coroutines, which we also called "interior" iteration, as opposed to "exterior" iteration by pointer-like things that live in variables you advance. Such coroutines are now finally supported by LLVM (they weren't at the time) and are actually a fairly old and reliable mechanism for a linking-friendly, not-having-to-inline-tons-of-library-code abstraction for iteration. They're in, like, BLISS and Modula-2 and such. Really normal thing to have, early Rust had them, and they got ripped out for a bunch of reasons that, again, mostly just form "an argument I lost" rather than anything I disagree with today. I wish Rust still had them. Maybe someday it will!"

I remember that one. The change was shortly after I started fooling with Rust and was major. Major as in it broke all the code that I'd written to that point.

"Async/await. I wanted a standard green-thread runtime with growable stacks -- essentially just "coroutines that escape, when you need them too"."

I remember that one, too; it was one of the things that drew me to the language---I was imagining something more like Pony (https://www.ponylang.io/).

"The Rust I Wanted probably had no future, or at least not one anywhere near as good as The Rust We Got."

Almost certainly true. But The Rust We Got is A Better C++, which was never appealing to me because I never liked C++ anyway.

Pony or bust.

If you have a value in mutable storage, and want to treat it as an immutable parameter without copying it first, you will need to provide some way to guarantee that it won't be mutated while being treated as immutable! There doesn't seem to be a definitive best way to do that (although the likes of Pony make a try at it).

The love child of Erlang and Rust exists already: Pony.

https://www.ponylang.io

It really is the best of both languages... unfortunately, the main supporter of Pony seems to have stopped using it in favour of Rust though :D.

But if that's really what you want, Pony is your language. It definitely deserves more love.

You can actually try to have a magic language which "does not ignore decades of PL research" but you are likely to get either something broken or a project that is likely not going to release in our lifetime.

Never a bad time to plug Pony lang[1] - a safety-oriented actor-model language. In addition to the numerous safety guarantees, you also get a beautiful syntax and automatic memory management. Really a great language that often gets overshadowed by Rust's hype-turfing.

[1]: https://www.ponylang.io/