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Comment by hharnisch | Hacker News Reader

A little backstory - I was working at Apple on the team that helped bring Swift to life.

The big roadblock (especially for things like frameworks) is 32-bit support. There's no 32-bit runtime for Swift. When that requirement is lifted I'm certain we'll see a flood of Apple apps built with Swift. There was (and still is) a huge amount of enthusiasm for the language internally. Many teams were working with it and plenty of internal tools where built with it. So yes, Apple is absolutely using Swift.

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So how do Swift apps work on 32-bit hardware like iPhone 5/4s if there is no 32-bit runtime?

What makes you think they do?

The fact that I'm writing Swift apps, releasing them to App Store and testing those apps on iPhone 5/4s and having zero problems with that?

The "32 bit Runtime" is a misnomer. Its a difference between the modern and legacy runtime. iOS (and iPhoneOS) never supported the legacy runtime.

The name comes from it being the only runtime for 32 bit OSX apps.

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...

the legacy runtime before the `non-fragile` one?

1) I can run a Swift game on iPhone 5 which is still 32-bit.

2) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24009876/how-can-use-cgfl...

Swift code is binary compatible with obj-c and xcode embeds a small Swift runtime library shim into your application for prior versions.

https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=2

But I really haven't tried it myself so someone else who has may be able to help you.

There's no support for the 32 bit OSX runtime. The 32 bit iOS is similar to the 64 bit iOS/OSX runtime and works fine.

> There's no 32-bit runtime for Swift. When that requirement is lifted...

You probably don't know/can't say, but is there going to be a 32-bit Mac runtime? Apple has spent zero resources improving the 32-bit ObjC runtime over the last decade, to the point where it's called the "legacy" runtime yet is still supported.

I expect a 32-bit Swift runtime would also require a modern ObjC runtime, but it seems rather unlike Apple to spend any resources now on 32-bit Mac (when they've decided not to for the last 9 years). I suspect that WWDC this June will be the beginning of the end for 32-bit Mac apps.

No idea! Sorry man.

Given Mac has been 64-bit for a long time now, why would Apple support 32-bit?

I'm curious about your use-case, actually. Presumably you're not targeting non-64-bit Macs. So are you using 32-bit for better memory use? In that case, maybe Apple should introduce a 32-bit-pointer-on-x64 ABI, like Linux's X32.

Let's hope we can get some delegates in AppKit that use weak instead of assign at the same time ;)

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