Author of Swift Language Chris Lattner is Leaving Apple; We're Interviewing Him (Ask a Question!) (swift.org) 339
Software developer Chris Lattner, who is the main author of LLVM as well as Apple's Swift programming language, is leaving Apple, he said today. From a post: When we made Swift open source and launched Swift.org we put a lot of effort into defining a strong community structure. This structure has enabled Apple and the amazingly vibrant Swift community to work together to evolve Swift into a powerful, mature language powering software used by hundreds of millions of people. I'm happy to announce that Ted Kremenek will be taking over for me as "Project Lead" for the Swift project, managing the administrative and leadership responsibility for Swift.org. This recognizes the incredible effort he has already been putting into the project, and reflects a decision I've made to leave Apple later this month to pursue an opportunity in another space. We're delighted to share that we are interviewing Lattner, who says he's a "long-time reader/fan of Slashdot." Please leave your question in the comments section. Lattner says he'll talk about "open source (llvm/clang/swift/etc) or personal topics," but has requested that we do not ask him about Apple, which is understandable.
Update: Lattner is joining Tesla.
Update: Lattner is joining Tesla.
Is it because ... (Score:5, Funny)
Is it because you like headphone jacks?
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Chris, can you confirm?! Is this true?! Are you going to be working with Tesla?!
I think that was a waste of a question.
Cross-platform (Score:5)
How cross-platform is Swift ?
Are the GUI libraries platform-dependent or independent ?
I.E: can i write a single Swift program with a GUI that will compile, work the same and look similar on multiple platforms: Linux, Mac OS, Real Unix-es & BSDs, AIX, Windows ?
Re:Cross-platform (Score:5, Informative)
Swift is an open-source cross-platform language (there's even a Linux server version), but the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch APIs on OS X and iOS are platform specific.
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Not asking about the Apple GUI ones.
Just curious if there's a generic one (like Qt, or Swing) or at least a plan to have one in the future.
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There are, in fact, several GitHub projects where people are experimenting with Qt and GTK.
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Is there a single swift program actually being used by more than 2 people in a basement which is NOT using these Apple APIs?
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Looking at? That doesn't answer my question. Is it being used for something else than a toy? And why? If I were to develop a Linux server application, Swift wouldn't even be in my top 10 language choice.
C++ winds unreadably award by a mile (Score:2)
Swift is in fact more confusing and convoluted to read than the ubiquitous C++.
I've done a lot of C++ in the past and a lot of Swift in the present. At its worst Swift is 10x more readable than the average C++ code. Even if for some reason you are looking at the name managed output of class/method names in the debugger just compare that to the multi-page joy that was (is?) template class debugger output...
Just the fact that Swift does not support multiple inheritance lends it the automatic win.
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(Telltale sound of dripping water indicating Android apologist)
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I'd have thought it'd be trivial to interface the open source version of Swift with GNUstep
Unlike Clang, the Swift compiler doesn't have very clean interfaces for abstracting the different Objective-C implementations (clang does because I wrote them, before Apple added support for their runtime). Instead, when you build Swift, you have a bunch of #ifdef __APPLE__ things that turn off the Objective-C interop for non-Apple platforms. This also means some quite big ABI changes, for example the Swift CoreFoundation implementation has different object layouts to the ones that Apple uses and the way
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That doesn't mean you can make a cross platform wrapper that will interact with the is GUI API using the same commands.
So if I were to say.
LINE (10, 10, 500,10,#FF0000 )
It would draw a horizontal red line 490 pixels.
Now this would require different API calls on different systems. But you translate that command to the different OS. That is what java does.
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If you find optionals confusing, I suggest you do something different to programming.
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C# (Score:5, Interesting)
What do you think about Microsoft and C# versus the merits of Swift?
What are Rust's prospects like? (Score:3, Interesting)
C# is well-established, and Microsoft has shown that it's very willing to adapt C# as necessary to support new techniques. I wouldn't be surprised at all if C# inherited good ideas from Swift.
I'm more interested in what Chris has to say about Rust, another much-newer language that's much closer in age to Swift, but also different from established languages like C#, C++ and Java.
Chris, what are your general thoughts about Rust as a programming language?
Seeing as it fits somewhere between languages like C++ a
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While it did get a huge amount of hype at various programming discussion forums in the recent past, a lot of this has died off, perhaps because of people becoming disillusioned with it.
I don't know what forums you're on but the Rust hype is fucking nuts on HN and reddit. I like Rust quite a lot as a language but I hear about it so much that I'm almost getting sick of it, like Node.js was dominating the hype cycle years ago and Ruby before that.
Also, while Swift has a very reasonable code of conduct, what are your thoughts about Rust's community, including its rather extreme focus on its code of conduct?
Lolwut? Swift's code of conduct is lifted almost directly from Rust's, they were both based off the same original document and written by the same person. I've also never seen any "extreme"ness or SJWness in all my time on the Rust forums.
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I like Rust quite a lot as a language but I hear about it so much that I'm almost getting sick of it,
Yeah, haha
Do we need them? (Score:3)
1) is the fact that it seems we NEED them.
Do we? Why would anyone that is a jerk not simply ignore a code of conduct and do what they liked anyway?
Is there a concrete example anywhere of a code of conduct stopping anything, ever?
You could come back and say "it gives us reasons to reject someone". Yes but you could have done that ANYWAY without a COC and treating everyone with the presumption of assholishnes to begin with.
That's the real problem I have with the whole COC frenzy, is that most of us are adul
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I love C#. It is my favorite programming environment. However, C#, like Java, is wedded to a virtual machine with Just In Time compilation. It was a deliberate and usually sensible design choice.
Swift, in contrast, compiles to native machine code. That too was a deliberate and sensible design choice. Swift can theoretically be a "systems programming" languages as in, "You can write operating systems with it.". C# is not suitable (as it is) for systems programming because C# programs generally do not intera
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However, C#, like Java, is wedded to a virtual machine with Just In Time compilation.
"Typically, apps that target the .NET Framework are compiled to intermediate language (IL). At run time, the just-in-time (JIT) compiler translates the IL to native code. In contrast, .NET Native compiles Windows apps directly to native code. [microsoft.com]"
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What do you think about Microsoft and C# versus the merits of Swift?
Is it:
What do you think about (Microsoft) and (C#)
or
What do you think about (Microsoft and C#)?
Why are strings passed by value? (Score:4, Interesting)
Strings are immutable pass-by-reference objects in most modern languages. Why did you make this decision?
Re:Why are strings passed by value? (Score:5, Informative)
In Swift arrays, dictionaries and strings are structures with value-semantics. As to why, well, to quote the Swift language reference manual: "One of the primary reasons to choose value types over reference types is the ability to more easily reason about your code. If you always get a unique, copied instance, you can trust that no other part of your app is changing the data under the covers. "
Behind the scenes, however, structures (including strings) are passed by pointer. Swift then uses copy on write so that the objects are completely copied only if and when the program attempts to change a value in them.
As such, a string parameter to a function has value semantics, but it behaves as if it's an immutable pass-by-reference object from a performance standpoint. Kind of the best of both worlds.
An exception would be a parameter specified as inout. (e.g. func f(s:inout String) )
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What if you pass a string to a function, and a different thread then changes the original string? Does that also copy on write? Or does the function suddenly see the string change?
(Thread A and thread B both have access to the same string S, B passes S to function F, function F reads S, thread A changes S, function F reads S again)
How much of Swift is Based on Groovy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Its been commented on that Swift tutorials look IDENTICAL to Groovy tutorials to the point that you even use the same variable names in examples (http://glaforge.appspot.com/article/apple-s-swift-programming-language-inspired-by-groovy). When created a Python to Swift converter, I responded 'wouldn't it have been easier to do a 'Swift to Groovy' converter??? To which developers replied, well naturally.
So how much of Swift was inspired by Groovy? Both come from more high-end language and look and act almost identical.
What hardware is used for workstations at apple? (Score:3, Interesting)
What hardware is used for workstations at apple?
Mac pro's?
Mac pro's with non apple cpu upgrades?
Imac's?
Laptops?
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you forgot the obvious: iPad
Re:What hardware is used for workstations at apple (Score:5, Informative)
Posting as AC, as I have in the past worked for Apple. Most developers at Apple have both a desktop and a laptop, usually an iMac and then whatever portable that they picked when the joined (for some developers this is primarily a meeting tool). Depending on what that developer does they then have a collection of other hardware (often pooled with people on their team) for development and testing (e.g.: hardware with diverse GPUs or screen resolutions). And then in other cases one or more prototype machine (sometimes in special secure labs).
There is a real culture of making sure that the developers run on the shipping hardware, so ordering anything custom (even more RAM) is often a difficult thing. At one point there was a lottery to determine who got to use the latest shipping iPhones and who was forced to use the oldest supported model, to make sure that people were feeling the pain of older hardware. A number of managers were except from that lottery... they got the oldest model by fiat.
The build clusters used to be Xserves but that was moving to clusters of Mac minis and MacPros. There were some Windows machines around (think iTunes and Quicktime), and I know some groups that did chip-level-design used linux, but standard Apple hardware rules the day.
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Exception Handling (Score:3, Interesting)
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And why so many changes with each release? The language is not as stable as it should be (the syntax, that is).
Darling, nothing is as stable as it should be.
as a language designer (Score:5, Interesting)
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As in Grand Central Dispatch?
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As in Grand Central Dispatch?
I don't know if that's what they're referring to. Grand Central Dispatch sounds similar to C#'s ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem() or the await task language features in newer versions of the .NET runtime. It's just a way to basically create some unit of work that conforms to a particular interface that can be queued up and then the language run-time can determine how to create threads, processes, etc. in whatever manner is deems best to execute those pieces of work.
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Grand Central Dispatch is actually an OS leve
Future of LLVM? (Score:5, Interesting)
Where do you see LLVM going?
Why would he want to work at Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
He left his job at Apple, so you are interviewing him? I don't think Chris wants to work at Slashdot all that much. Good luck anyway.
Does this mean Xamarin won? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Even xamarin is far from a silver bullet - it is extremely mobile specific, yet has many even more popular competitors (various js-based stuff, corona is very popular too).
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Parallelism (Score:5, Interesting)
Say, about fifteen years ago, there was huge buzz about how languages and compilers were going to take care of the "Moore's Law Problem" by automating the parallelism of every task that could be broken up. With single-static assignment trees and the like the programmer was going to be freed from manually doing the parallelism.
With manufacturers starting to turn out 32- and 64-core chips, I'm wondering how well did we did on that front. I don't see a ton of software automatically not pegging a core on my CPU's. The ones that aren't quite as bad are mostly just doing a fork() in 2017. Did we get anywhere? Are we almost there? Is software just not compiled right now? Did it turn out to be harder than expected? Were languages not up to the task? Is hardware (e.g. memory access architectures) insufficient? Was the possibility oversold in the first place?
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Certain languages like Scala, some Lisp variants, and Erlang do a pretty good job of supporting concurrent and parallel programming. To my knowledge, no programming language fully relieves programmers of the burden of devising design not including race conditions, priority inversions, deadlocks, resource contention producing serialized execution, and countless other "gotchas".
It is hard enough to find a programmer who can translate a recursive algorithm into a loop or visa versa. It is hard enough to find p
Re:Parallelism (Score:4, Interesting)
I did some work on parallelizing FORTRAN in the nineties. It never went very far; our parallelizing compiler ran out of swap space when you fed it anything larger than a twenty-line program. Not that swap space was all that big in those days, but it was clearly not useful in a real-world context. There were some good ideas, but also a great many realities that tended to break those good ideas.
Today I'd say, but this is after not looking at it very almost two decades, that the granularity at which the compiler is able to work is too fine; parallelism works better when you have larger chunks of work to deal with, which is still very much a programmer job. And at those fine granularities, dependencies (not to mention Amdahl's law) kill your efforts at parallelization.
So, in my opinion, it was oversold in the first place, and it turned out to be much harder than expected. But it sure sold those research grants...
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Of course the other main problem is that some problems are simply serial in nature and can't be parallelised (eg various iterative operations, waiting for I/O to continue etc) so it doesn't matter how many cores you have, the program can't run any faster.
BASIC (Score:2)
Any insight into language design choices? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am a 25+ year Objective-C programmer and among other topics, I teach "Mobile App Development" and "Comparative Languages" at a university.
I confess to being perplexed by some Swift language design decisions. For example,
- Why does Swift have both a "var" keyword and a "let" keyword? One should be sufficient with the other being a default behavior. If a symbol is not declared "var" then just assume it is constant or visa versa. Furthermore, it may not be necessary to have either of the key words because (I think) in every case, the need for variability and mutation should be determinable by the compiler. Type is already being inferred by the compiler, and mutability could reasonably be considered an aspect of type.
- Why are Swift collection types like Data always mutable? What happened to the concept of immutable containers from Cocoa. [Yes, I know the "bridged" CF types are always mutable, but that was another bad decision IMHO.]
- Swift is intended to be a "Systems Programming Language", is it not? Yet, there is no support for "volatile" variables needed to support fundamental "system" features like direct memory access from peripheral hardware.
- Having experienced frustration trying to port high performance graphics code from C/C++/Objective C to Swift, what's up with that? IMHO, Apple's sample code for using OpenGL/GLKit/Metal from Swift leaves the impression that Swift is unsuited to the style of "low level" programming needed/used by OpenGL/GLKit/Metal.
- Why not support "dynamic runtime features" like the ones provided by the Objective-C language and runtime? It's partly a trick question because Swift is remarkably "dynamic" through use of closures and other features, but why not go "all the way?"
- Finally, a trivial aesthetic critique: Why "var foo : typename" like Ada and Pascal (IIRC) instead of "var typename foo" like every language that inherited C style syntax? Is there an advantage to the Swift approach that I haven't seen, or was it just an aesthetic choice? Did the choice not produce some IMHO "silly" syntax for method declarations with named parameters?
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"every language that inherited C style syntax"
Swift's aesthetics, as you describe. come from ML - not C. Just as Mozilla's rust began life bootstrapped by OCAML.
Apple's previous adventure in creating a programming language - Dylan - originally was a LISP.
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- Why does Swift have both a "var" keyword and a "let" keyword? One should be sufficient with the other being a default behavior. If a symbol is not declared "var" then just assume it is constant or visa versa. Furthermore, it may not be necessary to have either of the key words because (I think) in every case, the need for variability and mutation should be determinable by the compiler. Type is already being inferred by the compiler, and mutability could reasonably be considered an aspect of type.
Well, for one reason, so that you'll catch typeos in variable names at compile time. You have to explicitly declare the symbols you're going to use.
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For your last bullet point (and also your first), the answer is type inference.
In a language with strong type inference, ": Typename" is both a compiler hint and an enforcement tool, not a piece of a variable declaration. You don't have to use it during variable declarations, and you can use it in places other than variable declarations.
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- Why does Swift have both a "var" keyword and a "let" keyword? One should be sufficient with the other being a default behavior. If a symbol is not declared "var" then just assume it is constant or visa versa. Furthermore, it may not be necessary to have either of the key words because (I think) in every case, the need for variability and mutation should be determinable by the compiler. Type is already being inferred by the compiler, and mutability could reasonably be considered an aspect of type.
Having to use a keyword to introduce a new symbol is a pretty critical reliability feature. If there's no keyword to say "I want to define a variable", then every typo creates a new variable, rather than a compiler error. Lots of scripting languages work this way, and it's hell on reliability.
- Why are Swift collection types like Data always mutable? What happened to the concept of immutable containers from Cocoa. [Yes, I know the "bridged" CF types are always mutable, but that was another bad decision IMHO.]
They're not. That's why you have "var" and "let" keywords. You use "let" for constants, and "var" for mutable objects.
- Swift is intended to be a "Systems Programming Language", is it not? Yet, there is no support for "volatile" variables needed to support fundamental "system" features like direct memory access from peripheral hardware.
"Systems programming" != "device driver development". Nothing above the driver level should be acces
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I don't speak Swift, but if I understand his first point correctly, each variable is introduced by a keyword anyway, so the most vexing part doesn't occur.
That would go a long way towards answering the first question, btw.
Open Source macOS? (Score:2)
Questions, and my best wishes. (Score:5, Interesting)
Since you're the creator of LLVM, I'd like to know, in your opinion what's the greatest advantage of LLVM/Clang over the tradicional and established GNU GCC compiler. Also, what's the greatest advantage of GNU GCC (or if you'd prefer, any other compiler) over LLVM/Clang, something that you'd like to "port" someday?
Also, since I work mostly with Linux development, what do you see as the greatest advantages of the Apple developer stack (libraries, xcode, etc) that are sorely lacking in the Linux developing scene, that we should strive to copy/implement?
By the way, and unrelated, congratulations on the Walnut Dining Table you made. It's amazing!
https://twitter.com/clattner_l... [twitter.com]
How much of Swift is based on Groovy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Question about this role (Score:2)
What.Will?.He?.Do?.At?.His?.New?.Venture?
The Mythical Compiler -VLIW (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there any hope for VLIW architectures? The general consensus seems to be that Itanium tanked because the compiler technology wasn't able to make the leap needed. Linus complained about the Itanium ISA exposing the pipelines to assembly developers. What are the challenges from a compiler writers perspective with VLIW?
Package Manager (Score:2)
This is really an XCode question. But why does XCode not have a native package manager? I've programmed commercial programs with both Visual Studio and XCode and I can say that NuGet is fantastic for C# and really helps boost the C# ecosystem. Why is there nothing like that for XCode.
Perl and Python also have great external libraries (as probably do other languages that I have never really used)
Oh and BTW why does refactoring of Swift code suck compared to Objective-C?
There are multiple package managers (Score:2)
I know you said native, but for the benefit of others who may not know much about the Xcode ecosystem, you can use the venerable CocoaPods, or the less venerable but more enjoyable Carthage. These both have extremely wide support (CP moreso). CP will generate a whole workspace for you and everything.
Looking forward, almost certainly Xcode will integrate the Swift Package Manager [github.com] which is still in early days, but you can see it coming down the pike soon, probably official integration this year at WWDC.
What happened to the OSRC? (Score:3)
Why is the Operating System Resource Center gone from your site on nondot.org/sabre?
There are a couple mirrors that date back to 2006 but what happened to the main site?
Apple commitment to LLVM (Score:3)
Apple has done great things for LLVM/Clang. I believe you were the key conductor in this. Does it mean you leaving we can expect less in this regard in the future, or are you just passing the torch in there, keeping it capable hands (aka there's not much left for you to do)?
Or some other change of circumstances?
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This decision wasn't made lightly, and I want you all to know that I’m still completely committed to Swift. I plan to remain an active member of the Swift Core Team, as well as a contributor to the swift-evolution mailing list.
Incidentally, it looks like he's going to Tesla. Not sure what he'll be doing there.
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Not sure what he'll be doing there.
VP of Autopilot Software. [tesla.com]
Read: Deep Learning Expert. I expect LLVM to come into play here.
Question mark or... (Score:2)
Any hope for more productive programming? (Score:3)
I work in the semiconductor industry and our ASIC designs have seen a few large jumps in productivity:
- Transistors and custom layouts transitioned to standard cell flows and automated P&R.
- Design using logic blocks transitioned to synthesized design using RTL with HDLs.
- Most recently, we are synthesizing circuits directly from C language.
In the same timeframe, programming has remained more or less the same as it always was. New languages offer only incremental productivity improvements, and most of the big problems from 10 or 20 years ago remain big problems. Programmers still have to deal with syntax issues in various languages, and if I want parallel execution in my code, I have to design for it from the beginning.
Software is helping us design our ASIC circuits from higher and higher level abstractions. But software doesn't seem to be helping us write our software. The abstractions aren't much higher level.
Do you know of any initiatives that could produce a step-function increase (say 5-10x) in coding productivity for average engineers?
When I first heard rumors about what became Swift, that's what I was hoping for. But it turned out to be just another programming language.
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It's beginning to look to me like Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) is the next big change in the way software is created. And whilst Swift doesn't support that natively, there are a couple of libraries that do support it in as Swifty a way as possible: RxSwift and ReactiveCocoa.
I can't say any more than that, as I'm early on in learning about this topic.
Swift governance (Score:4, Insightful)
Governance of the Swift project is firmly under the control of Apple, as stated here. [swift.org] How can Swift ever be a true community project if Apple controls it? Look no further than Java [computerworld.com] to see what can go wrong when a corporation controls a language.
Is Swift better than Objective-C for anything? (Score:2)
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Programming becomes a pleasure again, once you get past the past the hurdle of learning Swifts new features and differences.
I'll give you 3.
Swift makes header files unnecessary. Aren't you sick of maintaining both a .h and a .m file for every class?
Swift makes handling of nulls explicit. In Obj-C any pointer could be nil, and mostly it's not clear if that is actually a meaningful thing, or whether you need to check for nil "Just in case". Swift's optionals mean you always define whether a "pointer" can be n
Tesla Autopilot development (Score:2)
So why Tesla? What makes you a better choice than say, George Hotz ( except that he may not be sane)?
Do you have AI dev experience?
Leaving Apple (Score:2)
What excites you about your new Tesla job? (Score:2)
I hear you're moving on to work at Tesla [networkworld.com] as VP of Autopilot Software. Congratulations!
What three things excite you the most about Tesla?
Python?! WTF Over (Score:2)
Why, oh fucking WHY is their Python Code in the repository? Hasn't the world had enough of it, yet?
beware (Score:2)
Does this mean Swift will gain deep learning libs? (Score:2)
Chris, you mentioned you'd continue to be involved with Swift; I've recently been taking some classes involving deep learning / neural networks, and as a result my old dislike of Python is certainly coming to a middle.
Does your moving to head up the Autopilot Software division provide any indication that deep learning libraries may make their way into Swift so that some of us could engage in deep learning research and trials using that platform as a base rather than Python?
I fully support languages that are
why another curly brace lang? (Score:2)
Why dud you make Swift a curly brace language, especially as it seems you admire Python? One thing Python shows is that C style syntax is not the ultimate. I suppose you were in a hurry to get to the interesting stuff and just grabbed onto curly brace syntax?
I'd like to see a real programming language that can be taught to elementary school students, not toy stuff like Logo or Scratch. These days, seems Python comes the closest to that ideal. Some still seriously recommend C/C++ for the kids.
Your position at Tesla (Score:2)
Can you tell us more about your position at Tesla ? What exciting stuff will you do with Autopilot ?
Do you intend to open-source (parts of) it ?
Rust vs Swift (Score:2)
I have my opinion about the respective merits of Rust vs Swift, both being relatively new languages with interesting takes on safety, elegance and performance. What's your take on it ? Retrospectively, what would you have done differently in Swift that Rust got right, and what do you think Rust misses that you put in Swift ?
Linux? (Score:3)
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Elaborate?
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The one thing Apple does need to be careful of is that that while the pro market is small, it is a super-important subset - developers that develop iOS and Mac applications! Since you have to use Apple hardware for that, you would very much like powerful hardware to do so... hopefully we see the desktop updates rather soon and they ease some of the pent up demand for power powerful systems.
I think the laptops Apple is making are about as powerful overall for development as it's realistic to make them at th
Re:If this is open source... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ouch! I just walked into a goalpost.
I swear it wasn't there before.
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If a Windows version shouldn't be that difficult, YOU do it. That's the point of open source.
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RMS didn't "allow" software to run on Windows, someone ported it to Windows. (Kind of a big difference.)
You (or someone else) are free to pull the source and do a Windows port.
Like these guys did....
http://www.infoworld.com/artic... [infoworld.com]
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Open source doesnâ(TM)t require that someone else do the work of porting the software to your pet platform; thatâ(TM)s just your own laziness.
If a CORPORATION can put out the Linux and Mac versions, and have Windows developers on staff, porting to Windows shouldn't be a problem.
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Where's the Windows version of Swift?
Waiting for someone who's not a jackass to write it. I'd start with the Ubuntu version:
https://swift.org/download/#re... [swift.org]
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I believe THIS is the Swift you're looking for? https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSec... [twitter.com]
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Possibly copying libraries into each App bundle on iOS sidesteps one of Android's key security issues: Any exploitable flaw in any shared library potentially enables privilege escalation and destroys any utility or protection from Android's "every app has its own user id" paradigm of security. Android's sandboxes aren't... for that reason among others.
In contrast, iOS uses hardware virtualization capabilities of ARM processors to more truly sandbox apps. An app can gain root permissions and still not be abl
Re:Swift libraries (Score:4, Interesting)
Flaws in shared libraries can't enable privilege escalation in any operating system that I'm aware of except possibly some of those really old, pre-MMU mainframe operating systems. In modern OSes, shared library code runs in the same environment privilege-wise as the rest of the code in the app.
In fact, quite the opposite. Copying libraries introduces one of Windows's key security flaws: Any exploitable bug in a shared library is only truly fixed after every single app that provides a copy of that library gets updated to include a new version of that library. From a security perspective, providing multiple copies of a framework or library is generally seen as very, very bad.
Of course, the reason for it in this case was that the library was evolving quickly, and apps would get built against different versions. By including it in the app, you can run apps compiled against newer versions of the Swift library on older versions of the OS that lacked that version (or any version) of the library. IMO, what's really needed is a systemwide mechanism for downloading updated versions of these shared libraries in such a way that they get automatically kept up-to-date, but that's a much more complex solution than just including a copy of the framework in each app. Alternatively, I'd settle for block-level deduplication in iOS, but again....
Perhaps now that things have settled down a bit, they can move it into /S/L/Frameworks.
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Our shop has done several major projects in Swift, and (despite the pain thus far in migrating from, say, 2.2 to 3,0) will continue to recommend to our clients that all new development be done in Swift.
One of the major talking points that seems to be holding up is that Swift code seems to have about half to a third the bugs found in a typical Obj-C program.
The one thing I miss from Obj-C is a good built-in implementation of KVO for Swift object and structs.
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He's gone to Tesla, where he's going to be in charge of AutoPilot development.
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He already gave a full list of reasons why at the time the change was proposed.
https://github.com/apple/swift... [github.com]
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