swift-distributed-actors VS swift-evolution

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/

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.

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 You can probably try to statically link newer versions on old OS versions, or maybe ship a newer version of the standard library and dynamically link against that, but I have no idea how well those paths are supported.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

[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.

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...

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...

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...

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