It looks many developers in the community enjoyed my previous post detailing my thoughts and observations on the activity around the Swift open source project. So, I’m going to try to do this weekly — every Thursday, since the open source announcement was on a Thursday. Each week I’ll provide a high-level summary of what’s been happening, updates on interesting statistics, and links to interesting content. If you have any suggestions, please let me know! And now, the weekly brief!
This week on Swift.org
-
Manav Gabhawala submitted an interesting proposal to add implicit initializers to Swift. In particular, this would address the verbosity of converting between number types. However, as pointed out on the mailing list discussion there are safety and precision concerns.
-
Alex Denisov submitted a pull request that fixes 323 crashes.
-
Not very good at using git? Worry not! Lots of cool people aren’t that great at using it either. The message here: do not let this deter you from contributing!
-
Brian Gesiak, creator of Quick, asks who tests the tests? after noticing that the xctest framework isn’t itself tested. Testing a testing framework sounds funny, but some important bugs have already been found. FIXME.
-
In case you missed it, currying will be removed from Swift 3.0. (What is currying?)
-
David Owens submitted a proposal to add type annotations to
throws. When Swift’s error-handling model was first announced, the lack of explicit error types was a common criticism. There’s a good discussion on the mailing list. You can also read the original Error Handling Rationale and Proposal. -
Swift now has almost 200 contributors and over 230 pull requests have been merged.
-
Last week I mentioned that Foundation was largely unimplemented. There’s also some really surprising bugs.
-
Andrew Naylor ambitiously implements NSJSONSerialization.
-
Jacob Bandes-Storch submitted a proposal that aims to greatly improve the bridging of C APIs.
-
There’s an interesting discussion on the mailing lists to make classes and methods
finalby default. Anything that discourages or prevents subclassing is fine by me. -
The Swift Programming Language iBook (ePub) is available for direct download on Swift.org (instead of only the iBook Store) and is now under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License! Translations would be great.
-
Programming is little more than a “nights and weekends” hobby for Chris Lattner.
That’s it for this week! Subscribe or follow me to stay up-to-date!