Max Desiatov @maxd@mastodon.social

We can credit Property Wrappers and Function Builders in Swift 5.1 for making SwiftUI easy to use, but there’s an under-appreciated feature that was absolutely required: ABI stability. Without it none of Apple’s frameworks can have a Swift-only public API. https://swift.org/blog/abi-stability-and-more/

wait, wat 😲

I just recently discovered this `semantic` library, but I didn't know that it powers such great features

https://help.github.com/en/articles/navigating-code-on-github

Prediction: of all new frameworks for #SwiftLang announced at WWDC, SwiftUI will be open-sourced the last if ever. I don't think CryptoKit or Combine have majority of their code relying on proprietary components. This isn't true for SwiftUI. They'd need to open-source UIKit too

Working with SwiftSyntax on a lower level, I start discovering things I didn't know were possible or made sense at all. Case in point: top-level computed properties 🤯

(Not that I plan to use this in my code, but I always expected something like this would be a compiler error)

Has anyone noticed that #RealityKit is also a Swift-only framework? https://developer.apple.com/documentation/realitykit

This post is very sobering, feedback on Xcode is the most important. Neither Xcode nor any of the new Swift-only frameworks are open source. I bet benefits from open-sourcing them would greatly outweigh the harm, if there is any harm at all.

https://forums.swift.org/t/what-is-the-future-of-swift-in-the-server-side-what-are-the-advantages-of-swift/25099/12

Also, early adopters: brace yourself for the same problems in #SwiftUI I've been battling for the last few months in https://tokamak.dev: all views are customized via keyword arguments, type checker is gonna 🤯 Especially arguments ordered in a wrong way or a plain typo 😈

#SwiftUI has a dependency on an unreleased Swift 5.1 feature, check out this `@state` property attribute. This does look like the recently returned for revision Property Delegates proposal. Can safely bet it's gonna be accepted in some shape by fall 2019 https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/proposals/0258-property-delegates.md

TFW when Apple sherlocks your UI framework 😄 At least I've been moving in the right direction, because it does look similar to https://tokamak.dev. I hope reimplementing Swift UI API for WebAssembly wouldn't infringe on any patents/copyrights? (🍎 is not like Oracle?) 🤔

My problems with this began when I started implementing custom type checking of #SwiftLang source files. When a file is in the "scripting mode", all identifiers and types need to be resolved with completely different rules as compared to the "common mode" https://github.com/MaxDesiatov/Typology

The name of the file doesn't matter outside of a module. Apparently the best name for this is a "scripting mode", and it is also applicable to Playgrounds and shebang scripts. The latter described really well by Hector in his article https://krakendev.io/blog/scripting-in-swift

Tricky Swift interview question: does the order of top-level declarations matter?
The answer is "both" 😄

let y = x + 3
let x = 5

This will stop compiling if you put it in main.swift file of an executable module or in REPL, but is fine in any other file. Kinda makes sense 🤔

It’s apparently not easy (if possible at all) to build SwiftSyntax for iOS due to LLVM being the dependency? If anyone have done it successfully, please let me know here or on Swift Forums https://forums.swift.org/t/feasibility-of-building-swiftsyntax-for-ios/24958

Remember when people were saying Microsoft would ruin #GitHub? I don't think that's exactly what's happening, especially with the new Sponsors initiative. I'm on the waitlist and I hope it would allow my open source projects to become sustainable 🙏 https://github.com/sponsors

Surprised to discover that Azure Pipelines have 10 free parallel build agents for open-source projects. Migrated a couple of my projects from Travis CI, improvement is massive: CoreXLSX CI run reduced from 30 mins to 5 mins, Tokamak – from 3 mins to 1 min https://github.com/MaxDesiatov/CoreXLSX/pull/67

One thing this year WWDC would be bigger for me than Marzipan or Mac Pro: deprecation of the Xcode project format. Having separate directory and project hierarchy is ridiculous. Discovered a failing test that never ran on CI or locally because it was never in the project file 😖

You probably saw this article before, please forgive a slowpoke like me for sharing it only now, it’s really that good. I especially liked the dialogue-like widget for JavaScript vs Swift debate. Thank you Ash for writing up what I couldn’t express! https://ashfurrow.com/blog/learning-from-other-programming-communities/

Super interesting approach to type checking in https://dhall-lang.org: you can request an explanation for any errors that will print a short related reference and full reasoning for the error 😯

AR glasses from Apple are years away and aren't guaranteed to succeed. Only reliable immediate growth for Swift I see is becoming truly cross-platform. Compiling #SwiftLang to JavaScript, WebAssembly and JVM targets would make it a very compelling language to general audience.

Watch and TV apps didn't take off and I can hardly see those platforms bringing enough revenue for 3rd-party devs. We're being squeezed on the App Store by big companies like Facebook at the top and casino F2P games at the bottom. And most games aren't written in Swift anyway.