swift-distributed-actors
swift-evolution
swift-distributed-actors | swift-evolution | |
---|---|---|
2 | 127 | |
575 | 15,073 | |
1.4% | 0.7% | |
5.0 | 9.7 | |
18 days ago | about 17 hours ago | |
Swift | Markdown | |
Apache License 2.0 | Apache License 2.0 |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
swift-distributed-actors
-
Distributed Actors in Swift
Pretty exited for this. Looks like a good alternative to Erlang or Akka with the native performance / low resource utilization of Swift. Erlang lacks strong typing and Akka is DSL-hell.
Looks like they've open-sourced a transport [0] and are adding support for distributed tracing as well [1, 2], which is a huge aid for system operators and debugging.
[0] https://github.com/apple/swift-distributed-actors/
-
Catching Native Apps
Apple is in the business of selling hardware, and developing a cross-platform toolkit would have to potential to cannibalize that. I think Swift's weak footing in other OSs is also owed to that fact.
Apple's best bet is to create an ecosystem of hardware and software that is self-sustaining and moated. I'd argue that they are successful in that, but all those web platforms have significantly weakened the moat. You don't need apps like Sketch anymore (infact I consider Figma way superior), and you don't need most of their bundled native apps anymore (their are great replacements that are either native or web based).
So how will they strengthen the moat? Certainly not by further weakening it by sharing code with other platforms. They seem to be ready to accept that distributed systems won't go away and are obviously actively buying into that space (https://github.com/apple/swift-distributed-actors/). But, UI-wise, I'm only seeing renewed determination to push native apps: https://www.imore.com/apple-rebuilding-apple-music-native-ap.... And I think it makes sense for their bread-and-butter hardware business.
swift-evolution
-
Swift's native Clocks are inefficient
According to their changelog[0], Clock was added to the standard library with Swift 5.7, which shipped in 2022, at the same time as iOS 16. It looks like static linking by default was approved[1] but development stalled[2].
I expect that it's as simple as that: It's supported on iOS 16+ because it's dynamically linked by default, against a system-wide version of the standard library. You can probably try to statically link newer versions on old OS versions, or maybe ship a newer version of the standard library and dynamically link against that, but I have no idea how well those paths are supported.
0. https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md
1. https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
2. https://github.com/apple/swift-package-manager/pull/3905
-
Byte-Sized Swift: Building Tiny Games for the Playdate
[A Vision for Embedded Swift](https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/visions/e...) has the details on this new build mode and is quite interesting.
> Effectively, there will be two bottom layers of Swift, and the lower one, “non-allocating” Embedded Swift, will necessarily be a more restricted compilation mode (e.g. classes will be disallowed as they fundamentally require heap allocations) and likely to be used only in very specialized use cases. “Allocating” Embedded Swift should allow classes and other language facilities that rely on the heap (e.g. indirect enums).
Also, this seems to maybe hint at the Swift runtime eventually being reimplemented in non-allocating Embedded Swift rather than the C++ (?) that it uses now:
> The Swift runtime APIs will be provided as an implementation that’s optimized for small codesize and will be available as a static library in the toolchain for common CPU architectures. Interestingly, it’s possible to write that implementation in “non-allocating” Baremetal Swift.
-
Borrow Checking Without Lifetimes
I may be out of my depth here as I've only casually used Rust, but this seems similar to Swift's proposed lifetime dependencies[1]. They're not in the type system formally so maybe they're closer to poloneius work
[1]: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/3055becc53a3c3...
-
Functional Ownership Through Fractional Uniqueness
Swift recently adopted a region-based approach for safe concurrency that builds on Milano et al’s ideas: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
- Swift-evolution/proposals/0373-vars-without-limits-in-result-builders.md
- The Swift proposal that removed the ++ and –- operators (2017)
-
Crafting Self-Evident Code with D
No, it's not. Refcounting CAN be a garbage collection algorithm, but in Swift it's deterministic and done at compile time. Not to mention recently added support for non-copyable types that enforces unique ownership: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals...
- Statically link Swift runtime libraries by default on supported platforms
- (5.9) What is the point of a SerialExecutor that can silently re-order jobs?
-
Mac shipments grow 10%, as all major PC brands see downturns.
You can stackallocate buffers with unsafe Swift but it's not exactly fun to use. https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/main/proposals/0322-temporary-buffers.md
What are some alternatives?
puppeteer - Node.js API for Chrome
compose-multiplatform - Compose Multiplatform, a modern UI framework for Kotlin that makes building performant and beautiful user interfaces easy and enjoyable.
swift-distributed-tracing - Instrumentation library for Swift server applications
foundationdb - FoundationDB - the open source, distributed, transactional key-value store
zfs - OpenZFS on OS X
kotlinx-datetime - KotlinX multiplatform date/time library
okio - A modern I/O library for Android, Java, and Kotlin Multiplatform.
PeopleInSpace - Kotlin Multiplatform project with SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, Compose for Wear, Compose for Desktop, Compose for Web and Kotlin/JS + React clients along with Ktor backend.
swift-algorithms - Commonly used sequence and collection algorithms for Swift
swift - The Swift Programming Language
kotlin-wrappers - Kotlin wrappers for popular JavaScript libraries
kotlindl - High-level Deep Learning Framework written in Kotlin and inspired by Keras