Earlier this year, I read a couple Swift scripting blogs and decided to create a script to generate my Go data structure for my little Swift "search engine":
Because if you're scripting something out, it's very possible that you'll need to run it outside of a Mac in no time.
Plus, there's no decent dependency management yet and you can't compare the amount of external libraries commonly used for scripting with languages like Python or Ruby.
Scripting out with Swift sounds to me like the usual "Playing with new & Shiny". Which can be OK if you're just playing around, but I wouldn't do it with anything related to a production environment yet.
Because if you're scripting something out, it's very possible that you'll need to run it outside of a Mac in no time.
Yes, it's still early, but with Swift becoming open source, the portability problem will probably become less of an issue.
Plus, there's no decent dependency management yet and you can't compare the amount of external libraries commonly used for scripting with languages like Python or Ruby.
Thinking about this, I wonder if it is actually as big of a problem as some may think. Swift has built-in automatic bridging capabilities to both C and Objective-C. Assuming this works the same in the REPL/command line (I haven't verified this), then you can directly call every system library on your platform that is written in C or Obj-C (which is all of them). The need to download external modules like in Python or Ruby seems greatly diminished.
And to the portability question, on a Unix platform in general, the majority of libraries available for the platform are C libraries with all the capabilities you normally would have to get as a separate module for Python or Ruby. Since this is all directly available without separate modules, when you do need a feature not installed on your system, you would simply install a C library with that capability through your system's normal packaging management system or build/compile it yourself.
Well that depends on the point of view, if you're okay with Cocoapods being designed to modify your Xcode project, etc etc. That should be fine. Again, all of this is a pretty big overhead to just 'script out' something.
Nothing. Neither with Carthage. The problem is that they rely on the project configuration (Cocoapods requires also an xcode workspace on top of that). It's a bit overkill for just a script.
Yeah, I’m actually surprised Apple hasn’t made a play for this from day 1 since developing iOS/OS X often leads to writing/maintaining a bunch of home-made or 3rd-party scripts (usually in Ruby), making app development require not only knowing Objective-C & Cocoa but also some scripting language. After all if Swift is all about making it easier for more people to build apps more easily, this seems like a worthwhile use-case to go after.
The Swift standard library is not yet up to snuff for that, you still need to know Cocoa to do basically anything high-level. Thankfully I know Foundation better than I do straight-up POSIX, so that's tenable for me, but it's not for most people who want something script-y.
Not only that, but you also need to know the hocus pocus to bridge between (Obj)C and Swift. And let's not forget that the Cocoa header files are browsable, thus enabling “discoverability”, while Swift is completely obscure in that respect.
>Yeah, I’m actually surprised Apple hasn’t made a play for this from day 1 since developing iOS/OS X often leads to writing/maintaining a bunch of home-made or 3rd-party scripts (usually in Ruby), making app development require not only knowing Objective-C & Cocoa but also some scripting language.
Define "often".
Besides, Swift wasn't even that ready for application develoment from day 1.
This is nice, however I'm skeptical as to the virtues of video as a presentation format for this kind of content. I'd have vastly preferred a written document.
I'm not sure what you're expecting here. This was a conference talk, then someone recorded it and made a transcript. It's not like someone thought, "I'm going to present this content using video instead of writing it," and then recorded themselves talking to their camera.
Considering I've seen this said multiple times in Swift post on HN, I have to ask, why do you keep asking? From what I can remember they said It would be there by Fall...its clearly not fall yet, so why the impatience?
I expect a Linux port to be made available, but did they actually promise that? From what I can tell, they promised the open source part, and announced their intention to have ports to OS X, iOS and Linux (https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=29)
http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html
Here's the script that generates the Go data structure:
https://github.com/melling/SwiftResources/blob/master/bin/ge...
Simply having a few scripts makes it easier to update my site.
Btw, here are the other blogs:
https://medium.com/swift-programming/1-learn-swift-by-runnin...
http://www.strathweb.com/2014/06/using-swift-general-purpose...
http://cocoaheads.tv/scripting-with-swift-by-blake-merryman/