swift-corelibs-foundation VS verona

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...

According to this FAQ, snmalloc was designed for the Verona language:

https://microsoft.github.io/verona/faq.html

Unfortunately, I cannot find any significant code samples for Verona on the website or in the GitHub repo. There are a few types defined in a pretty low-level way:

https://github.com/microsoft/verona/tree/master/std/builtin

I think the future lies in figuring out how to get the benefits of that secret sauce, while mitigating or avoiding the downsides.

Like Boats said, the borrow checker works really well with data, but not so well with resources. I'd also add that it works well with data transformation, but struggles with abstraction, both the good and bad kind. It works well with tree-shaped data, but struggles with programs where the data has more intra-relationships.

So if we can design some paradigms that can harness Rust's borrow checker's benefits without its drawbacks, that could be pretty stellar. Some promising directions off the top of my head:

* Vale-style "region borrowing" [0] layered on top of a more flexible mutably-aliasing model, either involving single-threaded RC (like in Nim) generational references (like in Vale).

* Forty2 [1] or Verona [2] isolation, which let us choose between arenas and GC for isolated subgraphs. Combining that with some annotations could be a real home run. I think Cone [3] was going in this direction for a while.

* Val's simplified borrowing (mutable value semantics) combined with some form of mutable aliasing (this might sound familiar).

[0] https://verdagon.dev/blog/zero-cost-borrowing-regions-part-1... (am author)

[1] http://forty2.is/

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/verona

[3] https://cone.jondgoodwin.com/

Their approach lines up pretty well with how we do regions in Vale. [0]

Specifically, we consider the "spine" of a linked list to be in a separate "region" than the elements. This lets us freeze the spine, while keeping the elements mutable.

This mechanism is particularly promising because it likely means one can iterate over a collection with zero run-time overhead, without the normal restrictions of a more traditional Rust/Cyclone-like borrow checker. We'll know for sure when we finish part 3 (one-way isolation [1]); part 1 landed in the experimental branch only a few weeks ago.

The main difference between Vale and the paper's approach is that Vale doesn't assume that all elements are self-isolated fields, Vale allows references between elements and even references to the outside world. However, this does mean that Vale sometimes needs "region annotations", whereas the paper's system doesn't need any annotations at all, and that's a real strength of their method.

Other languages are experimenting with regions too, such as Forty2 [2] and Verona [3] though they're leaning more towards a garbage-collection-based approach.

Pretty exciting time for languages!

[0] https://verdagon.dev/blog/zero-cost-borrowing-regions-overvi...

[1] https://verdagon.dev/blog/zero-cost-borrowing-regions-part-3...

[2] http://forty2.is/

[3] https://github.com/microsoft/verona

Does this count? https://microsoft.github.io/verona/

What about new Rust that "Microsoft Research" trying to "explore" https://github.com/microsoft/verona/blob/master/docs/explore.md ?

Fun fact: the person who created Pony, Sylvan Clebsch, has been working on a Microsoft Research project called Verona. From it's README [0]:

> Project Verona is a research programming language to explore the concept of concurrent ownership. We are providing a new concurrency model that seamlessly integrates ownership.

https://github.com/microsoft/verona/tree/master