I wonder what's going to happen to tensorflow Swift now, seemed like Chris was the main champion there.
Swift for Tensorflow could never be taken seriously outside Apple community.
On Linux, Foundation barely works and one still needs to selectively do either import Darwin or import Glibc for basic IO stuff.
Then we are already at Swift 5.1, and Windows version has to be built from source will lots of caveats.
How can it even be taken seriously against Julia, Tensorflow for C++, ML.NET all of which work across macOS, Linux and Windows as of today, and offer the same strong typing benefits?
However S4TF should be taken seriously if you understand what they are trying to accomplish and how deeply they designed machine learning support into the language. Take a look at http://fast.ai new course offerings using S4TF. Swift has always been a long bet. If it doesn't work as you want it, is still short sighted to discount it in the future.
also: https://twitter.com/JokerEph/status/1221831507351748608
I wasn't even aware of http://fast.ai's existence.
Now the language needs two things in order to be safe from an hypothetical abandon from Google : - running smoothly on linux (I though it was already there but your post seem to imply that it is not the case) - getting the auto-diff out of the alpha stage where people can build framework on top of it (fastai seem to be ready to jump on that ball which is nice)
https://swift.org/getting-started/#using-the-repl
> On macOS
1> import Darwin
2> arc4random_uniform(10)
$R0: UInt32 = 4
1> import Glibc
2> random() % 10
$R0: Int32 = 4
Basically they set a portability boundary in the wrong place.
The random number examples aren’t saying that’s the right way to generate random numbers in a platform-independent way, it is specifically demonstrating how to import system libraries on your local platform.
(0..<10).randomElement()There are plenty of other examples I can look for, like file handling.
I think the point of the example was to demonstrate importing platform-specific modules, not random number generation per se. But you're right, it should probably be updated to do something else.
There are widely popular FOSS languages with much much less documentation...
And lets not put Swift and performance on the same sentence, they still need to catch up a bit.
Aside from .NET and Rust, all the others are not players in 2020.
By the way, it is a list of languages with compilers that currently outperform Swift.
A, the "some part of some huge player with 2000 divisions uses some otherwise niche language, surely said language is making a comeback" argument.
You can find all kinds of niche/sidestepped languages if you look hard enough on any organization that has 200 products, 1000 inside projects, and tons of engineers. Doesn't mean said languages are making a comeback anytime soon.
For languages that actually thrive nobody needs to enumerate major and minor projects where they're used, because they're too many to mention. But when the main news for "Planet language X" is "big corp decided to use X for something among the 100s things they do", well, they need all the straws they can grasp.
Same way Latin remains a dead language whether some Oxford professor recently published a book of new poems he wrote in it or not...
I had to manually set LD_LOAD_PATH on macOS, but then everything worked on macOS and Linux.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Abrahams_(computer_pro...
That would be a weird move if they were looking to outright drop it.
[0]https://twitter.com/DaveAbrahams/status/1207690883782467584 [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Abrahams_(computer_progr...
It's good to try different things; S4TF tried, and failed. No one really cares about it at Google except the team developing it. The researchers are adopting other new technologies, like JAX.
I have said, Swift is to Objective-C, what Scala is to Java. Sure, there are plenty of people that like Scala, but its 'academic stuffiness and complexity' doomed it to a niche language.
Same with Swift. It is doomed to be an apple ecosystem only type of language.
All I wanted is a Python* look alike, with some solid static typing, what we got was a franken/monster/language where people felt to try out their little academic pet-peeves, and sucking out the fun out of programing with it, and making it less accessible to beginners.
GO is becoming popular, not because it is shoved down the throat to people, but because its own merit, and mainly because they kept it simple. It is a closely to a "static Python and some minimal features" we got....
*I think Python is a great language, and very accessible for beginners, just not suitable for large projects due to its dynamic type system
Swift may not be what you wanted, but it is a long way from being a dud. Swift didn't have to be great, it just had to be better than ObjectiveC.
Because of some technical argument, or just personal aesthetics?
>I have said, Swift is to Objective-C, what Scala is to Java. Sure, there are plenty of people that like Scala, but its 'academic stuffiness and complexity' doomed it to a niche language.
While Objective-C was really cool, it was neither modern enough, and few people liked it (mostly old NeXT/early OS X guys, but not most of the iOS crowds).
And Swift is easy to use and nothing like Scala in academic-ness and complexity.
>All I wanted is a Python look alike, with some solid static typing*
That's not what the ecosystem needed, or what people in general want (there's Go for that, for one). Swift is somewhere between Rust and Kotlin, features wise.