Apple tailors Swift System library for open source and Linux support

Apple has open-sourced Swift System, a library designed to improve the experience of calling the operating system API from Swift on supported platforms, including a new Linux implementation. Swift System was introduced in June for Apple platforms only, and is an alternative to importing C interfaces directly, where the …

[Anonymous Coward]

"... eventually act as the single home for low-level system interfaces for all supported Swift platforms"

Mmmmm systemd?

"... mainly covers just a few file-handling APIs"

Because you can't find/write a C lib for THAT?

"...a problem is that SwiftUI"

The part from above points out not the problem with Swift, but Apples thinking in general. Apple seems to ignore absolutely everything non-Apple to the point where they have no idea on what makes the competition attractive. In this case, they're porting a piece of something in solitude without regards to how it has become attractive in even its native environment! That just reeks of "We've been isolationists so long we don't know how the rest of the world works anymore", or something like that. Again though, here's also the suspicious advertisement of porting the easiest things to port (stdio)... no C programmer is impressed with confidence by that.

I dunno. I'm not an active IT professional anymore, but I've LOOKED at Swift and thought that if I wasn't "All-In" with Apple, then there's no point as it seems like an off shoot of their Objective-C. However, if they really want to port something useful, they should port their actual GUI toolkit first. This article's author is dead on here with the SwiftUI comment. Porting something _ONLY_ in the middle doesn't even give people a chance to use it, it's basically like making proprietary drill bits without a drill to use them. I only keep Apple stuff on my radar in hope of their GUI toolkit, everything else to me is just platform specific fill-in.

[gnasher729]

I'd say porting code for all their non-GUI libraries would have first priority, and allowing bindings to all platform specific code. There is tons of useful stuff in Swift.

[martynhare]

Porting the GUI over alongside the rest is very important, otherwise it is no more multi-platform than .NET.

Had Microsoft gone all in with their framework and not half arsed it with .NET Core, they would have market dominance right now, with people being able to rapidly prototype and build desktop applications with consistent GUI forms functionality. We might have even seen Linux desktop shells and window managers written with it.

Apple in their ignorance are making a huge blunder because any native GUI apps which “just work” when packaged for multiple platforms would add to Apple’s potential for dominance, especially if theirs is the “native” solution in that regard. Given Microsoft are far far behind on ARM, now is the perfect time to dethrone them over the next 5-10 years.

In Linux-land, developers will take whatever good code works. Distros have never had a consistent, native toolkit (Qt is as close as they have ever had) and will fall in line with whatever works and people want to code for.