Always great to see community members see success.
This news makes it easy. I’m starting the engines on this…
In reference to when Apple created a project called Sherlock that was a direct copy of a popular Mac app Watson
Earlier versions of Mac OS had an app called ‘Sherlock’[^1] that could search local files and the web in a fairly rigid manner.
‘Watson’[^2] was a third party shareware app very much inspired by Sherlock (and obviously, given the name, not trying to hide that!) that was much more flexible, more ‘OS X-like’, arguably much more user friendly, and was open to plugins (like, there was a movie time search plugin, an eBay plugin, an Amazon plugin etc).
Sherlock 3[^3], in MacOS 10.2, was redesigned with a UI very like that of Watson, and also allowed similar plugins, making Watson obsolete.
In the Apple developer world, “being Sherlocked” came to mean “your app being made obsolete by Apple including identical functionality with the OS”.
1: https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/f2d124c36d74f71c6... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelia_Watson 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)
> Together, we’re building a comprehensive package registry to serve the Swift community’s evolving needs.
The great thing about a registry is that it doesn't care where the original source is hosted. We will be moving away from that model completely as we work towards this.
I like the SPM, but it definitely has its "rough edges."
Having an index like this, is great.
However, I guarantee that there will be some caterwaulin', if Apple decides to regulate which packages get indexed (which I think should happen, as it's now an official Apple brand).
I have mixed feelings here. If they disallow too much, they’ll alienate too many projects and there will be an exodus of non-Apple platform Swift devs.
I guess it doesn’t really gate pulling any dependencies you want, but too much and/or the wrong kind of filtering (e.g. removing non-Apple alternatives to core Apple libraries) would not look (nor feel) good.
It would not be a good thing, if they did that, here.
It would be interesting to see what they do with some of my packages.
I release alternative UI views, and Apple is infamous for wanting to force all developers into conforming to their UX.
It would make me sad, if they blocked things like these:
https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner
Everyone in the Go community more or less uses the same Go modules support built into the SDK binary, much like how almost the entire DotNet community uses the NuGet package manager support built into the dotnet SDK binary. There are no extra dependencies to grab your project dependencies and build it.
My experiences in those langauges is that there is so much less debate over tooling, and people just get work done. No one in DotNet is waging an equivelent holy war about Gradle vs Maven etc...
I'm all for choices, but the languages who have made package management a first class citizen in their SDKs tend to be the languages I've enjoyed working in the most. I think package management tooling is a critical piece of developer ergonomics.
People used to joke a lot about how JS has a new framework every week, but I feel that way about Python build tooling! I've now had to use uv, poetry, pipenv, hatch...
"Hello Robert, Thank you for your patience while I awaited a response from our operations team.
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They will destroy the developer experience when they add identity and signing.
Unlike them, Apple takes a stance of contravening the public good to emphasize lock-in. They refused USB-C for as long as possible to sell licensed serial connectors that their Macs didn't even use. They fought tooth-and-nail to politicize the free distribution of software when the EU wanted to enable sideloading. They abandoned open initiatives like Khronos, for no reason other than to screw over cross-platform developers. They give Safari special OS entitlements that they refuse to extend to competing mobile browsers, and then justify it as if they can't write a safe OS.
There is no company on planet Earth that goes this far to undermine FOSS. Apple is the fakest Scot.
If they’ve ever done something we don’t like we’re not allowed to celebrate anything.
Might send the wrong message.
It makes sense for them to build their services using Swift instead of something like Go and the Swift-on-server team has been doing a lot of work to get swift in a usable state on Linux. Having a thriving opensource (starting with a package index) makes a lot of sense to them for that.
My only problem with Swift is personal taste and experience. I tried it on linux few times (admittingly few years ago now) and generally I wasn't a fan. Go and Rust solve all the problems that Swift could have solved for me, so I didn't bother. But just like node got an entire class of developers into server side programming, Swift could be apples approach to get their iOS and MacOS developers a way to easily write server side code in swift as well
I prefer Swift over rust as it has the same memory-safety guarantees with a much more approachable syntax, and is generally easier to work with.
As per the tooling, idk enough to report on that.
As per the LLMs remark, I do not use that at all, still, and hopefully never will, though I already know I won’t have the choice at some point, sadly.
> Documentation for the standard library is presently hosted on the Apple Developer website.
Sure enough, by Apple policy, the documentation pretends no non-Apple platforms exist. What happens for an API which could be different if your system isn't fruit-flavoured? They don't care and won't talk about it.
Is the feature I need available for this Linux device? No idea, but it does work with watchOS and tvOS made by Apple...
If it’s in Foundation, yes. Swift 6 on Apple OSes now (since a while ago actually) uses the same open-source foundation as Linux. If it’s a proprietary framework (e.g. TabularData), no. It’s simple.
For the rest, almost all Swift packages developed by Apple are fully compatible with Linux, and the documentation of said packages is usually explicit wrt. platform specifics, AFAIK.
But although that's enough for me to want no part of it, that's not what I was gesturing at. When we dig under the "Foundation" to look at the standard library we find that contrary to your assurance what works and how it works varies from one platform to another, just Apple only care about Apple platforms and so as usual they don't think that's worth mentioning.
They do have this information, they just don't publish it on their Apple pages because they're Apple and yet they insist this counts as the Swift documentation - and that should be all the reason you need not to take such "support" seriously.
Also I’m not sure what the Core thing you’re talking about even is.
Swift functions are bound at compile time when statically known. Dynamic dispatch is done through vtables for native Swift classes, and through witness tables for protocol existentials.
