> C interoperablity, while it exists in Swift, can be very painful
Interesting, that hasn't been my experience. I'm curious, what have you ran into that was painful?
Interesting, that hasn't been my experience. I'm curious, what have you ran into that was painful?
The second is that it's a lot of code and files to make when we only have one import to hack something quickly. For a full library it's probably a very cool feature though.
The third one is more related to my use case. I made a binding with a non-C codebase, and Swift cannot directly import C functions AFAIK, so I had to write C code in addition to the Swift one to make headers. It's not impossible, but it does take time to write all of that in a third programming language.
The fourth problem is related to library imports. In SPM, you either import a system library, or an xcframework. If your app targets any non-Apple platform, xcframeworks are not an option, so if you made a binding to your own lib that's annoying as it is probably not installed while you're building. And even if you're targeting Apple platforms, making an xcframework without Xcode is not well documented.
I probably missed a few problems as my experience is not very extensive, and there are probably better ways to achieve some of the things I wanted to do, but there isn't much documentation about all of that online anyway as far as I saw.
I solved that through importing the dependency with Conan, and having extra steps running afterwards that would perform some quick and dirty lipo, xcodebuild and PlistBuddy stuff. It just wasn't that complicated, and only a few headscratches, but then it'd work and there was no need to touch that again, but situations may vary and I get that it could be painful in some cases.
You don't need to justify op with old anecdotes, people want to know what the issues are today, if any. At least that's what makes this website valuable for me.
In any case, this particular observation is timeless: language bridges always have trolls under them. Maybe your project can get away with using the bridge anyway, but maybe a highly critical API gets locked out because the bridge deals poorly with variadic arguments or object lifetimes or templates/generics or nested objects or latency/overhead assumptions or.... whatever, and the troll conks your schedule on its head. Try to minimize exposure and prioritize steps to de-risk the bridge.
Not OP, and I for one don't, but noting the age of the reported experience would be valuable. I have also noticed the "stale cache" problem. It leads to confusion and misunderstanding.