oscargrouch

SwiftUI is an attempt to stop the spread of people coding for things like React and instead focus in a Apple only SDK so they accomplish their goals of developer lock in.

Knowing why Apple is doing this is important to understand why this will never happen.

Apparently the feature they are using is function builders (1) and its already working on the current versions of Swift. So at least now, nothing is preventing other people to try to replicate in a open source manner those features.

By the way, there are some projects on Github that already implements the same functionalities.

Don't wait for Apple to open source this kind of stuff, because one way to enforce lock in, is through API. And Apple is far away from being a benevolent big other as some people might naively assume.

1 - https://www.swiftbysundell.com/articles/the-swift-51-feature...

Swift had Linux support almost right on the beginning. I think that even Apple are supporting this effort.

Windows on the other side were started as a community effort of only one brave fellow. That later was even hired by Apple as far as i know.

I guess this is why this is much splashy than the Linux support. It was more of a community thing and less of a corporate thing as the Linux support was.

Giving in the end you are comparing, for me at least Rust is more in the family of languages like C++.

Very powerful, fast and close to the metal, but with uglier* syntax and not as productive as the next family of languages. Which are:

Java, C# and Swift (unlike C++ and Rust) for me are pointing into solving a very hot spot of programming, with the balance of power, being more pleasant to program in and feeling more productive.

Your code will be almost as fast as a C++ program, but you dont need to feel (that much) miserable writing stuff into it. (And i say this as someone that likes C++, but knows its not the most productive and pleasant experience)

It remedy some pain points of programming, that in my point of view at least, Rust didnt addressed the same sweet spot as Swift does.

Theres also some good things about Swift right in the corner, that is support to C++ bindings and a more fine-grained control of memory.

Once the memory ownership changes, than we will also be able to consider Swift for the same things as C, C++, Rust and Zig can right now.

Also i would say that dinamic calls while embedding script languages and function builders are very strong points that the language is becoming more powerful with each release.

Also some things like binary stability that Swift have that Rust doesnt are thing to take into account for, giving there are a lot of cases were shipping just the binaries and know they will still work is something very important for projects that cant afford to be open source.

I would consider to use Rust whenever C++ would also fit, but if i can use Swift i would not consider using Rust, because at least for me is a much better language to code.

I think people from the Rust community dont need to fear, because Rust have a strong community right now, and in that particular topic, is Swift that need to catch up and shake up this feeling of being a "apple owned language".

So i dont think they are aiming for the same thing, and therefore they dont need to be compared in a us vs. them basis, giving you can code on both, and i think it could be great if you do it.

Theres a false adage that you need to pick just one language, and having used a lot of languages and platforms over the years, im pretty happy now that i know that such thing doesnt exist.

You are better picking from 2 to 3 languages and use them according the goals of what you are building.

For me, my three languages are: C++, Swift and Python.

C++ for hardcore stuff, Swift for everything that a language like Java or C# could be considered and Python for the more relaxed (and now also expert) stuff.

You can replace Python with Ruby, Lua, etc.. replace Swift with C#, Kotlin, Java, Go, Scala, etc.. and replace C++ with Rust, Zig or C.

But if you mix the families, i say you will have a hard time using Python or C++ in the wrong places.

And this rule is also valid for Rust unfortunately.

* Note: i know this is subjective and a lot of people would find it more beautiful than Swift instead. Its ok and even good that we dont all have the same tastes.

I think this would be better rephrased as: "When will @akersten(me) come out and say "no" to this?"

The app stores are on your phone, the apps you should install on your property should be your decision and no government or company should have any say on this.

Its a matter of right, its a matter of freedom, and we should not just have the sad option to choose the one who we will abdicate our freedom for.

We should not fall for this false dichotomy of choice where by picking any of them, we loose our freedoms anyway, only having the freedom to choose who will pick for us.

I think its cool if you have this high-level abstractions that help in productivity as long as you have a 'fallback mode' to a more powerful api.

This is even true for script languages for instance. This is what make Javascript or Python more powerful than the language let them be. Being able to 'fallback' to C if things are not working the way they should.

Having SwiftUI or React are ok, if you can call imperative UIKit api's or web DOM when you need it.

Im very skeptic that this model will be feasible for the more "hardcore" cases of applications. So its important to have a powerful way to control things in details.

In hindsight, the modularity and the power that the web UI api gives you today is something to admire.

Its hard to have other examples where the bazar model ended up with better tools than the cathedral model. Especially if the cathedral model had time to do it later with the technological advantage only experience gives you.

I love FreeBSD much more than Linux, and i wish i could use it instead of Linux on my desktop/notebook machines.

But the graphics have to play a catch up game with Linux, and in my experience a couple of drivers were missing or not working properly (like wireless stuff, acpi, etc..)

The performance of the network stack is the best of any OS, and the interface with the OS in general is much more well designed than Linux, giving Linux is more of a Bazar effort with things stitched here and there to make some things works.

It's sad that the amount of man-hours on Linux, make it almost unavoidable and i bet this will be more and more true with time even with Windows and OS X.

I think this is a case where "It's the economy, stupid" gets right.

We need to build a economy for open-source projects or else the tech titans will eat the world.

People need to wake up that its not the nineties anymore, and without a better ecosystem for independent projects to thrive, we are doomed to depend on the scraps of what the titans left to us (mostly their open-source collaterals)

Some independent project might pop here and there, but keep them going without structure will lead them to a slow burn to death.

I would recommend GN (https://gn.googlesource.com/gn/)

It has almost the same syntax as Bazel, but its implemented in C++.

Super-fast and tend focus on Ninja build files.

I've even created a fork that works for Swift here and it works pretty well.

Its the meta-build project for Chrome, so its optimized for big projects with a lot of dependencies. I dont actually understand why is not much widespread giving the bad shape of meta-build systems (like CMake).

The flaw in you comparison is thinking that whoever is in control of this will think in your well being and not actually cheat.

This exact thread is over this "good dictator" being caught cheating and thinking about their own well being first, with their users being damaged and treated as second-class citizens.

The company have a great marketing strategy that makes you and others first you are first class, while in reality their goals and objectives comes first in detriment to your expectations about it.

But somehow this marketing campaign is so good, that even when caught in the act, a lot of their users are still in denial.

BTW, about mall cops and "pre-crime"; mall cops cant arrest anybody before they commit a said "crime". Also, the definition of what is a crime and not is pretty dangerous and used by people with malice over and over to resort some form of control and manipulation over public opinion (see Bush "War on terror" for instance used to bomb Saddam and cap citizens rights and get reelection, which is basically "War on drugs" 2.0).

So, Apple provides the users? As in; Apple actually own the users as a cattle farm?

The users do not have rights at all (like cattle). Not even free speech on the phones they own?

The worst thing to me, is the number of people trying to defend this sort of thing, as if it was the most natural thing.

Looks a lot like stockholm syndrome to me.. or you know.. remind me a lot how a lot of people under fascist regimes were unaware of how wrong things had turned out.

> A pretty familiar HN trope is calling in the Tech Billionaire Ex Machina to solve the world's problems

Love how you creatively defined this concept. This is a recurring pattern i´ve seen particularly in tech, and its not just over billionaires..

In psychoanalysis theres this great lacanian concept of "Big Other".

Once i understood this concept better, its much easier to spot my own flaws on counting on the Big Other (that is actually some illusory tendency of our minds to give us some comfort and help us to cope with the brutal reality).

You can see a great fictional tale about this concept embodied in "The Wizard of Oz".

Once we understand that the big other we were always counting on is in fact pretty much "smoke and mirrors", and that the big other (unlike in the wizard tale) doesnt really care, its a sour wake up call, but one that makes you grow up a little.

And if you not only believe in Big Others, but also assume they have a good willing nature, especially the ones that followed a road paved with gold, i have a bridge to sell to you..

You also dont see this mentioned that often, but failed attempts can be key factors of success to the successfull ones that comes later.

Therefore, we should be less intolerant with failure and understand that it forms some sort of a ladder where the failed attempts are steps that lead to the successful ones.

I miss this sort of "tech archeology", and i think that the status-quo of tech would do a greate service to us all if they aknowledged the failed attempts more, as this would give more incentives to people to take risks on innovation, knowing that even if they fail, their efforts would be remembered as it would lead to something that worked fine, with a couple of tunings.

There are a lot of bold and bright people that did amazing things that may (or may not) lead to big things, but that face the cruel reality of not being remembered because they are not the success case.

Because in the end, we are only able to succed when we embrace failure and stop being afraid of it, knowing that even if we fail, it might be key to success if not ours, from others that can pick it up from where we stopped.

Thats because you have divided the languages by properties and i´ve originally divided them over the class of software that can be written in those languages.

More as "system language" category, where you can code OS´s, JIT compilers, Browsers or any time/memory sensitive kind of software. Thats why they were packed together.

Classically, those sort of things could be only coded in C and C++ as the attempts in doing them in "higher level" languages mostly failed.

To be fair Steve, i didnt use this as to invalidate the assumptions on Rust. Just that we need to be more carefull to just take things for granted.

Im not even taken this research for granted, and are waiting for further work to really prove the points, or even going against them.

Im just using as a cautionary tale for people going too fast on some assumptions, and not taking care to study sample by sample.

I have no doubt that Rust have a great future ahead of it. But it will take more time and lines of code to turn all of those wishes people have into reality.

It would cost much more to rewrite in Rust.

Again thats why im saying that if the project would start now in 2020, all of those would be pretty good points. Right now is too late for that.

As another example, you can get just the V8 VM for instance. For start, with the ammount of solid code out there it would be nuts to talk over a rewrite..

Now imagine if we add to that, that the knowledge on JIT compilers is so difficult to grasp, that you would also need to have those same great engineers in the new language/platform you are planning the rewrite.

Giving the age of Rust, and giving you already have a bad time of finding those in the much older C++, imagine the time it takes to have the same quality people in Rust.

I know a lot of people are bully about Rust, but in reality things are not that simple.

(On the bright side, is not that hard to taught a C++ engineer to code in Rust)

If it was written from the start in Rust, i have no doubts. But thats not the reality being faced here.

Right now the Chromium codebase have less bugs than if it was written in Rust, because of how many hours and efforts that were spent on the codebase to make it work smoothly.

Also the particular engineers with particular know-hows work with a particular tool. Its not easy to find them especially if you are forcing to use a new language in a giving project. It will take years and even decades to have the same quality people you already have in C and/or C++ in Rust.

So it will take time to have an engineer that can make, lets say, a multi-process compositor in Rust. What about many people with that particular special knowledge that take years to be good at.

So in real life its not just a matter of a language being a better fit. Theres a lot of other vectors to take into account.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

I have no doubt that Rust could save some sort of bugs. If you read all the comment i´ve made, you will see that we are talking about a massive codebase already coded in C++.

Giving the time it is alive, all the engineering hours, investiments, tools, etc.. most of the bugs that Rust could have prevented right on the beggining are already covered (Chrome also uses fuzzers and static analysis tools to automate C++ code)

> This year alone saw 2 issues from Project Zero in Chrome that would have been prevented by Rust

Thanks for making my point even clearer. If you really knew the size of the codebase, having only 2 issues on Project Zero is kind of a compliment to Chrome.

By the way, it was yesterday, that i´ve saw a research with fuzzers applied in C, C++ and Rust codebases.

In that research, Rust had the same overall count of bugs and even some 'zero day' sort of ones not any different from C++ and C codebases (maybe just better than the C one).

Its a pitty i can find where it is (I´ve saw it on Twitter, but its pretty recent).

> Chromium is an incredibly security-sensitive piece of software, and that really is an excellent fit for Rust. It's not a boogeyman argument and the Chromium team themselves are the ones pursuing it, it's not being forced on them.

A Chrome started from zero in 2020? probably.. but thats not the reality here. Millions of lines of C++ code, and its not just a matter of language, but the knowledge and people with the know-how to write those pieces..

Thats why im saying is not worth it..

That is the problem with default narratives, they dont adapt well to every case.

Chromium codebase is a massive codebase. It works, its efficient and fast, its sophisticated and complex, its well tested, had all sort of bugs that was taken out of them. Its really well written C++ code with modern ownership semantics. So a lot of mistakes that are used as boogeyman to convince people to use Rust are barely problems you really face.

And no matter what wonders Rust promisses, a lot of bugs would get back there in case of rewriting things.

Rust can make a very good point when the thing to be rewritten is in C (if is not a billion dollar codebase like Linux). But with big codebases, well written and modern C++ it doesnt make sense at all.

I get it why someone would start a new project in Rust though.. but the things dont add up when we talk about big codebases already coded with good C++ practices.

As someone that deals with a chromium-based codebase everyday, i dont think this is a good idea at all.

Unnecessary overcomplication on the codebase, making it more difficult to understand. (Rust and C++ are complex beasts)

The only thing i could think of, is to replace the tools that are mostly in Python.. But this will be a lot of work.

I guess maybe Google wants to employ good Rust enginneers and need to have some "playground" for them.

Swift on the other way, will have native C++ interop, and soon will give the ability to manage the memory ownership the same way C++ and Rust does (not just defaulting to ref-count)..

Once Swift have those properties we will have one more good contender in the same arena as C++, Rust and Zig.

Rules for society and commutative living is understandable, as the rights of a collective should be as equal or bigger than the rights of a individual.

This line of thinking doesnt apply in the relationship between Apple, its developers and its consumers.

Its a direct relationship and we are trying to understand here what rights Apple have vs. the rigths their developers and consumers have.

> Following your analogy if you've bought a flat, nobody is obliged to deliver food to you, especially when some food vendors do not comply with delivery's rules.

What you are lacking here is that theres a conflict of interest going on. The better scenario would be "Apple Homes Inc" also owning a fast-food chain, having the power to define, the food delivery you have access to.

The key thing here, is that they do it before you are even aware you are lacking options. So you wont feel as freedom of choice is being taken from you, because when you look at the "food store", you have options. And having options make you feel that you have choices and freedom, while you actually dont.

Some people like you, could be fine with it. But my main point is that its breaking foundamentals laws our societies are built on. Freedom, property, etc..

There is no specific law yet, because its unregulated. But im pretty sure that once law experts decide to really tackle this issue, some of those things will get much clearer.

A company like Apple or Google have too much power with this, and you can imagine the mess if somehow the powerful of the world get their hands on this powerful pipelines that can control the lifes of so many..

Without good and effective laws to really regulate them, we can be in a mess real quick.

(And im not even debating the rights of people who create apps and are dumped with clients wanting their products but not being able to reach them, because Apple forbid them with bogus reasons)

He/she made his/her points of why he/she believe so. I think that this is the important part, because after that anyone can make their own minds about it.

Sure any prediction is pretty difficult to make, but languages can be "cornered" and have a harsh time to grow beyond their original umbrella, if it dont manage to be adopted in other scenarios.

Problem is, in a lot of those scenarios, its already a "blood bath" with several programming languages already doing the same.

We have seen this trend and with this historical knowledge we are free to speculate about its future as if there is no 'black swan' events, which nobody can predict.

We know that any prediction is risky, but it looks to me that he/she at least layed down the foundations of his/her thinking, and i must say it looks good as it matches with the previous experience and patterns over other technologies.

Its too crowded, and a lot of great technology are having a bad time to stay relevant, so no wonder that Kotlin will have a difficult time too. And you dont need to be an oracle to understand that.

The big question here is one simple thing: property.

Imagine someone selling you a house and despite that you think you own the house the seller defines what things you can or cannot have in your own house, and even the ones he let you have, you must buy through them (so they can get a tax and force control) and if suddenly they are not ok with that anymore, it can simply vanish from your home.

"Hey look, you cant have that knife that its not from Apple Houses, it will hurt your kids.. we are always thinking on your safety"

Then you buy a car that you think its the one you like, but its not on you Apple Home store, so you are not allowed to drive that car.

But hey Apple homes have said its for your own safety, because that car was evaluated and could kill your wife.

In this case its clear "Apple Homes" succeeded in through marketing in psycological tatics to influence the house owner to do be ok with those things and still think he actually owns the house while the property is in reality leased where they define what you can access to or what can simply vanish even if you bought them.

I just cant understand how people can try to defend this sort of behaviour even when its clear it goes against their self interests and can damage them in several ways.. as the parent have said, just some sort of "stockholm syndrome" can explain this.

This sounds like a 'deprecation tatics' to me.

You use a pavlovian adequation mechanism on your users for some time, labeling as "dangerous", until you completely ban the thing.

By then users wont miss.

I´ve never used anything Apple by this same reason. Apple seems to think that once you by one of their products, they own you.

Its not just inappropriate, for me its pretty scary and humiliating.

Its like that girlfriend or boyfriend who thinks it owns you, and want to say what you should dress or if you can hangout with our friends.

It dont get it how people can be ok with this kind of stuff (as this is just one example) and later just say it snarkly as if it was your kid being naughty, where actually it can have severe consequences if they can get away with it, and future generations wont even argue because its already normalized for them.

You should pardon me if in your linguistic-cultural background some wording i pick might sound more sensitive than im aware of, as its not my mother language, so i might miss some nuances.

As you can see reading further the core of the point i was trying to make is; we are all imperfect, thats a fact of life.

Than we have fitness, and as more sophisticated things get, fitness is harder to achieve.

To be fair, i dont know how much Eich was a good fit as a CEO for Mozilla, all i can deal with is that he was booted not because of performance, but a political stuff that got uncovered and that was against the image Mozilla was known to defend. Fair enough.. is it serious? Yes, because it damages the image of Mozilla even if its not the fault of the corporation, because it sounds like an endorsement..

Ok, but its all a matter of weighting, but not only looking for the short term, but the long term.. maybe there was someone in Mozilla that had the technical baggage and also the socio-political views

Again, i dont know how well the person picked to be the next CEO can evaluate and weight decisions in the deepest level not only of policy but also engineering.

But i´ve seen the external movements of the chess board, and this last one, made it more clear where Mozilla is heading and how they are evaluating their decisions.

Mozilla did bold movements that did not worked out, but they were not tottally misguided, as they could actually succeed, so they were not maded by a totally unaware person. Its just that its super hard to do everything right and have luck at the same time.

But i think, the real problems were not in those bold movements (and right now when you look at them in the rear window, they look just like cash burned) but in the innability to follow and keep their core projects moving.

For instance, the browser took too much time to keep up with the multi-process architecture in Chrome. It took like 4 years if im not mistaken..

Meanwhile there were a lot heat being dispersed in moonshots.. again, is not that the moonshots were wrong per-se, but as long as the most of the energy were being expended in keeping up in the core of what make mozilla matter today.

But hey, the moonshots maybe were misguided somehow, but here, there this one or two that we invested in the past that is starting to bear fruits.. we were lucky.. so why now shutdown the projects that might actually be the ones that can save mozilla in the future?

If it was just a matter of closing the offices elsewhere in the world(like the one in Berlin), but we know that part of the engineering not only now, but in the beggining of the year were booted of the company, and some of them in things that should be strategic for Mozilla in the comming years.

The pressure is hard, but the good CEO´s will make a stand and defend the things that might not look very good now, but that will be key in the future..

And i wonder, how much a CEO or boarding that could go deeper in the engineering rabbit hole could have helped into making the right decisions.

Again, i dont know very well the CEO or the board, all i see is the chess pieces moving from here.. and from what i can see, joining the pieces of the pass movements, i have a sour taste in my mouth that what was once one of the greateast, shiny companies of high technology, a role model to me and to many people, are starting to repeat the misguided steps of companies like Yahoo.

Sorry for "the MBA´s", as i dont want to offend anyone, but what i meant is the pattern in the moves, it looks a lot like things Ballmer would do, not Gates. And the difference lies in how much they are informed to take the good decisions they need to make.

And tech people often lack the philosophical, social and political baggage to make the good decisions on those kind of matters, so in my opinion they must be helped not chased. Because in the end this might be important to the survival of the entity, that might look good on the paper and in its image, but might be lost in its direction.

It sounded like a rant, and i think it was harsh on my part, but its because i care and really like Mozilla.

Its when the times are rough that the good decisions are really needed. so i just wonderered.. and i would love to be proved wrong, really.

I tend to be more on your side of the fence and remain skeptical.

And something that may be used as evidence for my skepticism, is why instead of firing those people, where we know a lot of them are pretty good ones, they did not relocate them instead?

Even if we suppose, they decided to not invest in things that are not considered pragmatic, more to the core of Mozilla... Even if some of them were working coding in Rust for instance.. why dont they just shut down the projects that they considered 'fancy' and relocate those amazing engineers to work into core parts?

For me it smells like something is rot on the top level, and that in turn, will lead to more bad decisions in the coming years, unless something really radical happens (Microsoft did it, so theres hope).

Edit: one more evidence that the things are somehow rot, is that money going to pay for ads (and this is exactly the path taken by Yahoo)

There's no need to appeal by lowering the bar so i can relate/understand. I have a politically progressive point of view, that goes totally against what we are referring here.

But lets not mix things up here. People that are conservatives and even homophobic in my experience have more to do with the cultural views of a giving period that they were raised and i think that in some cases, we must not take things lightly, but also give some time for them to rethink their values.

And im pretty sure that kicking these people on the teeth wont help them to get integrated at all. The only thing they will learn in to lie better and be a better hypocrite.

Here public/private boundaries are very important. So if the guy is tweeting about this point of view and damaging the image of the company, of course, this would be a good motive to fire him.

But if he believe this in private, dont force others in the company to follow his socio-political views and is good in what hes doing, even if you dont like his political views, we should not fire anyone because of this.

Pedophiles on the other way are people with very harsh psychological problems that may lead them to commit a very serious crime. You dont need to resort to this sort of rethorical trick to make me understand, as i already did before (you already have my empathy here as im on your side).

Really, with time we learn that we are all handicapped here and there, and by becoming more humble about that, we learn that we need to accept and work with people with a lot of different views, backgrounds and actions or else we are all getting cancelled.

We need to be more careful about social sidelining people, because we will just turn some people that were mildly into something to become real radicals and also at the same time losing good hands that would otherwise help us into build a better future.

What make the most harm to the society: A guy contributing in private, financially, to entities that lobby for policies that goes against gay people or a CEO and board with impeccable and fair social and political views but that end doing actions that harm the core of a company that is best know for their engineering culture, good products, open source and freedom values?

Because Mozilla will be vaporized in the coming years.. does it really worth it?

I wonder how much of this, has too do with social justice going to far in the harassment of Brendan Eich.

I mean, maybe someone with his background in charge would know why its important for Mozilla to keep this kind of projects even if it looks they are not going anywhere, because this is what gives Mozilla meaning in the end.

Im not a mozillian, so i might be totally wrong, but maybe this is a case of the MBA's taking over and trying to focus into what they have learned to do.. look at the profit margins and think they are spending too much in research projects.

There are a lot of examples of other companies losing their engineering culture, starting to think more in terms of cash and profit, and finally vanishing its purpose and meaning.

IBM(lost in the 80's), Microsoft almost loosing it in the Ballmer era, Sun, and the most proeminent case: Yahoo.

Just to make it clear: Tech companies as any other company must have a good financial health and this is very important, but they cannot afford to loose their soul.

Once their engineering and innovation culture is gone, they become void and suffer from a slow bleeding til the death.

We must face it, our economical systems of incentives, the economical game generally speaking, its broken.

And tech and arts are proeminent endeavors that tend to get trojan horsed by this yuppie mentality turning things that once had meaning, into meaningful cash cows that work for the few people that cash out from the corrupted source.

(Apparently, it works a little better for industrial-level enterprises).

My hope is that, with time, this will become more evident, and research find innovative ways to make a better economical game so that creative, art and engineering culture kind of companies can have a much larger life span.

By the way, they had a pretty good leverage on Rust (and Rust was a really risk bet that ended doing great). The fact that they fired the people with this background just shows that they have no clue of what they are really doing.

* Edit: just being clear about people with conservative views.. I dont like and even despise what he did politically speaking, but as long as he were a good fit for the job, and never forced his political and social views into the company, i dont agree with the outcome.. and the reason is starting to show up now.. Much more important things are starting to fall out, and in the end even people with progressive views and good engineering background ended fired in the long term.