Swift on FreeBSD Preview

https://forums.swift.org/t/swift-on-freebsd-preview/83064

by glhaynes • 9 months ago

235 156 9 months ago

forums.swift.org

hazn2• 9 months ago

what i am pondering is: is it easier in theory to port swift to freebsd rather than linux? the facts that macOs has shared history with freebsd tells me yes, the fact that llvm favors linux (?) tells me both.

also, congrats, the swift and freebsd are ambitious in terms of new deployment platforms and compatibility! (see embedded swift, oci freebsd containers, freebsd on firecracker)

rootnod33• 9 months ago

Why would llvm favor linux? FreeBSD also officially moved from GCC to LLVM for the base system, so I don't see why LLVM wouldn't support it.

rjsw• 9 months ago

I would say that LLVM is more important to FreeBSD than it is to Linux.

hazn2• 9 months ago

a good question, my line of thinking was: if llvm allows easy ports to freebsd, why is freebsd always a lower tier than linux in llvm based projects?

weak reasoning, as it might just be a supply/demand and not a product quality question

zapzupnz4• 9 months ago

is it easier in theory to port swift to freebsd rather than linux? the facts that macOs has shared history with freebsd tells me yes

That shared history goes back a LONG way. The base components from FreeBSD that are in macOS are absolutely ancient. I think the most modern shared components are just the userland tools.

So I don't think it would make much difference at all.

Someone• 9 months ago

I don’t know whether you know, but there has been a Linux port for quite a while (https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-linux-port/ is from December 2015).

https://www.swift.org/install/linux/ points to https://hub.docker.com/_/swift, which has images for Red Hat, Amazon Linux, maybe others.

jiehong• 9 months ago

Porting on more platforms is always great, and a good way to find hidden assumptions.

rootnod33• 9 months ago

Are they also gonna take the reigns and officially be the maintainer of the FreeBSD package in ports or are they gonna wait for some volunteer to package it for them and choke on the bug reports whenever someone finds an issue?

vtail• 9 months ago

Do people use Swift outside of Apple iOS/macOS development in real life? Especially on platforms like Windows/Linux/*BSD?

rootnod33• 9 months ago

I guess so. In a way it makes sense if you can share your code base between the iOS/MacOS app and your backend. It makes development easier. But I guess that the majority of apps is not running MacOS servers for the backend. So far it's probably some node backends and all going JSON inbetween. But for some dedicated apps without a web portal inbetween it might be easier if app and backend are both in Swift.

repelsteeltje2• 9 months ago

Only for iOS apps. Apple does not offer a backend.

turnsout3• 9 months ago

Not true at all. Swift is a very capable backend language, Apple has open sourced a lot of great libraries to power server software development, and there are projects like Vapor [0] that are used in production.

[0] https://vapor.codes

tiltowait• 9 months ago

It’s not super popular, but support is necessary to make it so. There are some well-regarded frameworks, like Vapor, that are written in Swift.

afavour2• 9 months ago

Chicken/egg, I think. There was a burst of activity of Swift on the server a few years ago and frameworks like Vapor seem like they’re still pretty active:

https://vapor.codes/

But I think “why” remains a valid question when you could make a safe pick like Node, Python etc. I really like Swift as a language but I’d still struggle to justify using it outside of iOS.

KerrAvon• 9 months ago

Swift is a peer to Rust, not Node / Python. It has some nice affordances that Rust doesn't, while still being a native-compiled language.

wlesieutre• 9 months ago

There were three major server side Swift projects, and Vapor is the surviving one from that era

Dead projects are

- Kitura https://github.com/Kitura/Kitura

- Perfect https://github.com/PerfectlySoft/Perfect

Don't know of large organizations using it in production, the vibe I get is that it's useful for an iOS developer who wants to deploy a small server for their product without learning Python or Javascript.

You could certainly use it at larger scale, but you have to justify giving up the big ecosystems of its competitors.

zerr• 9 months ago

Does not support Windows.

andrewl-hn• 9 months ago

Arc browser famously had native parts of the UI done in Swift, which admittedly is not a lot: browser tabs, some popups and buttons here and there, a lot of their settings UI is rendered in HTML and is stock Chromium. Which is probably why they actually made a port of it to run on Windows rather than rewriting it into something like Qt or WPF or whatever.

Ladybird browser team planned to start using Swift in their codebase, but it hasn't happen yet.

andrekandre• 9 months ago

  > Ladybird browser team planned to start using Swift in their codebase, but it hasn't happen yet.

whats the holdup?

GeekyBear• 9 months ago

Like Rust, Swift is a compiled language that offers memory safety and data race safety by default.

worik4• 9 months ago

Not really that much

It's been two years since I was an iOSSwift programmer, but the concurrent/parallel facilities were quite woeful. Memory protection no nonexsistant

I do not miss it. This might be useful for porting Apple software, but do not start new projects with it.

viktorcode2• 9 months ago

Data race safety is not offered by default. In Swift 6.2 you can enable strict mode and it will cover majority of data race problem, but not all.

timeon2• 9 months ago

by default

As far as I know there is no clear boundary between safe and unsafe.

tehnub• 9 months ago

Could SwiftUI ever be used outside of Apple?

dejv• 9 months ago

MattDamonSpace2• 9 months ago

Probably not, Apple would have to opensource it and that’s unlikely

viktorcode2• 9 months ago

SwiftUI is build upon Apple's frameworks like Metal, CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation, and UIKit / AppKit. If someone want's to make a version for another platform, they will have a whole lot of work to do. That is the real show stopper, and not the core SwiftUI features like many were led to believe

wkat4242• 9 months ago

Personally I stay away from Corp owned languages. Even cross platform ones like .net, Java and also swift. With the single commercial party owning it you never know if theyll close it, change things for the worse or get acquired by a hostile party which obviously happened to java :(

MattDamonSpace2• 9 months ago

Apple’s the exception that proves the rule, they do a fantastic job supporting legacy APIs, frameworks, and devices

vlovich1235• 9 months ago

Which language would you classify as not corp owned?

It’s also weird to include Java and Swift in that list considering both afaik are maintained by a separate foundation. Java from Sun is even predominantly basically OpenJDK with some remaining proprietary Sun / Oracle bits but it’s the reference open source implementation used by most everyone.

mk892• 9 months ago

It'd be nice to use it for server side too, but the ecosystem is really not mature and the build system is not on the same level of Gradle or similar.

Plus, most of the open source libs are one person's weekend projects, from 3 years ago...

It's a great language, but nowadays tooling/ecosystem and build systems are key to success.

cosmic_cheese6• 9 months ago

…and the build system is not on the same level of Gradle or similar.

Worth noting that Gradle's long list of capabilities can sometimes be as much of a liability (or at least a frustration) as it is a boon. A great many projects don't need even a fifth of its complexity.

lukeh4• 9 months ago

I’m using it on Linux for an embedded product. No reason other than it’s a nice language that I am familiar with and productive in. The async/await features are quite nice too when you need to implement a lot of protocols / state machines.

pjmlp3• 9 months ago

Yes, because Apple gave up on the server market, so that demography usually uses Linux based servers and does code sharing between backend and their iDevices apps.

latexr• 9 months ago

The Swift compiler and runtimes have a few dependencies. Please install the following dependencies:
(…) python3 (…)

Wait, which part requires Python, and why? And is that only for FreeBSD, or in general? And is that something which will change? Feels very weird that a compiled systems language is dependent on a high-level scripting language.

TheJoeMan• 9 months ago

https://github.com/orgs/swiftlang/repositories?q=lang%3Apyth... From a quick look, appears to be the test suite. Which makes sense, hard to validate your language with itself.

ux2664783• 9 months ago

That greatly depends on the codebase and the language.

https://github.com/SWI-Prolog/swipl-devel/blob/master/tests/...

jshier• 9 months ago

LLDB also needs python if you want to use its scripting integration.

bananapub• 9 months ago

it's not weird at all - you need something sensible to run complicated things while bootstrapping the compiler. Rust does the same thing: https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/building/how-to-build-...

mshockwave• 9 months ago

It's likely that Swift compiler is using LLVM LIT (https://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/lit.html), which is implemented in python, as the test driver

airspeedswift2• 9 months ago

Python and LIT are used heavily to build and test the compiler, but that is only for building it, you do not need it to download and use the built toolchain. The python dependency is more about its use in LLDB.

airspeedswift2• 9 months ago

The Swift toolchain includes LLDB, which relies on python for some debugging features. The compiler and runtime itself do not use python.

hirvi743• 9 months ago

I absolutely love Swift. I understand some may disagree, and perhaps many of their arguments are quite valid. However, no language is perfect, and I just feel like Swift has some features that shows that a lot of thought was put into some features -- not to disrespect any other languages.

Considering the static typing, guard statements, protocols, lack of ++/-- operators (Lattner's argument was convincing), let/var, being able to make function parameters immutable, being able to lock symbols down to the file level, easy integration with c languages, etc..

I have not used SwiftUI, so I cannot judge it, but I do not think any issues with it are compelling arguments against Swift as a language (that I have read).

Lattner is my modern-age programming-hero. I'm glad to see FreeBSD will be able to share the love soon enough.

ezfe• 9 months ago

And SwiftUI is not part of Swift open source, it's just for Apple platforms. The underlying Swift language features could be used by other UI systems if someone wanted to make a crossplatform system, though.

myko2• 9 months ago

Swift is such an excellent language. I hope it continues to grow outside of the Apple ecosystem.

troupo4• 9 months ago

You can watch Lattner's interview with Theprimeagen. It's a haphazardly designed language where pressure to ship from Apple as a whole overrides any design or development considerations.

That's why you end up with a compiler that barfs at even the simplest SwiftUI code because Swift's type system is overly complicated and undecidable. And makes the compiler dog slow.

That's why you end up with 200+ keywords [1] with more added each release.

That's how you end up with idiocy like `guard let self = self else { return }` (I think they "fixed" this with some syntax sugar) because making if statements understand nulls is beyond the capabilities of heroes apparently.

And this is just surface level that immediately came to mind.

[1] It's not a typo: https://x.com/jacobtechtavern/status/1841251621004538183

seec2• 9 months ago

Some anecdotal evidence of its terrible qualities are the major degradation of software quality in the Apple ecosystem. In particular the rewrites or brand new softwares feel much worse than it used to be.

I feel like if it was a good language, it should make things better; of course there may be some other confounding factors but it's hard to not link the software quality problem to the Swift push.

hirvi743• 9 months ago

Lattner's interview with Theprimeagen.

Oh, sick! Thank you for bring this to my attention. I didn't even know this interview existed. I watched Lattner's three interviews with Lex (though I'm not a indifferent about Lex). I do love Theprimeagen though -- he represents us neurodiverse devs well.

a compiler that barfs at even the simplest SwiftUI code

I have never used Swift UI. I honestly have used Swift mainly for automating a lot of stuff I used to do with Applescript or little scripts for minor things. I have never actually used Swift for any GUI application development.

That's why you end up with 200+ keywords [1] with more added each release.

Sure, like I previously said, no language is perfect. I am less concerned about the number of total keywords vs. the average number of keywords required to accomplish what I need. I do not feel like I honestly have had to use any more than what I commonly user in .NET/C#. In fact, I think C# might honestly be worse.

https://github.com/e3b0c442/keywords

`guard let self = self else { return }`

I think you can do something like this as Swift 5 or 6:

`guard let self else { return }`

Don't quote me though (It's also not much better looking, imo).

turnsout3• 9 months ago

Wow, this is great news. I still don't understand why it has taken so long, when Swift on Linux has been around for 10 years. But as a FreeBSD user, this is very welcome!

fridder2• 9 months ago

Loving all the new developments with FreeBSD.

kchoudhu• 9 months ago

I'm not complaining, but also why?

zapzupnz4• 9 months ago

Why not? Why wouldn't an open source project want their increasingly platform-agnostic language to be supported on as many platforms as possible?

MBCook2• 9 months ago

It’s a fantastic language? I’ve come to really like it. Strong type system, is it to work with, lots of resources available, compiles to a binary, interfacing with any other language that you can link to with C, the syntax doesn’t look ugly to me (quite subjective), excellent concurrency support…

What can I say I’m a fan.

gocsjess• 9 months ago

I believe apple is making OCI-compliant containers which is written in swift. I hope this helps the containerization in FreeBSD.

bartekrutkowski2• 9 months ago

In what sense? FreeBSD had containers before anyone heard about Docker ;)

righthand• 9 months ago

Yeah talk about reinventing the wheel so Linux people don’t have to learn a slightly different system (one that is ironically easier to use and better organized than Oci containers).

Gud• 9 months ago

Jails are not containers.

irusensei3• 9 months ago

Jails are great but are not OCI-compliant.

fridder2• 9 months ago

Just this week the foundation dropped an article about OCI compliant containeraztion: https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/oci-containers-on-freebsd...

jonhohle• 9 months ago

This is awesome. I have an Omada container running on my desktop that would be great to move to my FreeBSD server.

irusensei3• 9 months ago

Thats cool I knew those were coming but the most interesting thing in here is that it seems to be running the Linux images under the Linuxlator (hence he had to enable the linux service) as opposed to creating a Linux VM like the other operating system do. Pretty cool!

DeathArrow• 9 months ago

What can you build with Swift on FreeBSD which isn't easier with other languages?

jhatemyjob2• 9 months ago

Software that is meant to run on Apple platforms.

frizlab3• 9 months ago

absolutely not

zapzupnz4• 9 months ago

Swift on Apple and Swift on literally-everything-else are very different stories at the moment.

bhokbah• 9 months ago

Everything will be easier to build with Swift on FreeBSD for a Swift developer compared to any other language

oaiey2• 9 months ago

A lot of good news recently for swift. I am a bit jealous as my go to language C# / .NET is recently not announcing fancy things.

I really like swift going beyond Apple. Particularly the port to android is IMHO crucial, however, now they are in the UI cross platform hell. Let us see if Apple is playing this better than Microsoft. Unfortunately, I have little hope. The only native contenders in the field right now are IMHO are react native and flutter which are both UI toolkits first and language second. Which I find gruesome.

troupo4• 9 months ago

I am a bit jealous as my go to language C# / .NET is recently not announcing fancy things.

Depends on what you think fancy things are. Both C# and .net are busy releasing a lot of features.

You're forgetting that C# is a 25-year-old language at this time. The exciting features they release are things like "access native memory allocation in a GC language", "native Arm64 support", "support for post-quantum cryptography", "tensor support" etc. while already running on all the platforms that Swift is only now announcing as achievements.

SvenL• 9 months ago

Yeah, also the ecosystem, aspire, ef core, Orleans, ML.NET etc..at this point I don't know what's really missing.

cosmic_cheese6• 9 months ago

It'd be nice if Apple made SwiftUI cross platform and I'd be singing in the streets if UIKit got ported, but that seems unlikely at best.

I believe that there's strong community interest in some kind of Swift UI framework for Android, though, and so there's a substantial chance that a third party solution will appear.

CharlesW3• 9 months ago

skip.tools is one third-party solution for creating Swift + SwiftUI apps for Android today.

rubyn00bie• 9 months ago

I’d absolutely love it if they made SwiftUI cross platform for both mobile and desktop. Flutter is nice but it’s still sort of a mess sometimes when targeting desktop instead of mobile.

troupo4• 9 months ago

It'd be nice if Apple made SwiftUI cross platform

It's a nearly impossible task. Just ask Qt, who have been at this for thirty years.

garbthetill2• 9 months ago

Correct me if im wrong, but isn't the pain points for mobile devs, the need to have intimate knowledge of both pl to build & maintain a good "backend/functionality" of the app over time and that the UI portion of the app is quite simple to learn, build and maintain.

So is it necessary for the swift team to try get swift ui onto android, versus a developer building their app "backend/functionality" in swift, compiling it down for both ios and android, then bridging the android bindings with a UI made in kmp etc

I recently learnt that amo and protonmail use this solution but instead of swift android, they were using uniffi-rs and seemed to have great results, I think proton ditched react native for this solution, which to me sounds like a more streamlined way of getting native performance without needing the overhead of managing multiple language. I guess we will have to see how mature swift android gets and if it can replace uniffi-rs etc which would save even more time

ardit332• 9 months ago

UIKit is very mature and tied to the iOS ecosystem and a bit more complex. SwiftUI is easier to port (since it is still a incomplete / subset features of UIKit).

yAak• 9 months ago

From what I've read, SwiftUI is using parts of UIKit under the hood, so it also doesn't seem too likely.

idatum• 9 months ago

Speaking of .NET, I've been successfully running .NET 9 on AMD64 FreeBSD. It's nice to have that choice.

runjake• 9 months ago

I guess it's a matter of perspective. Dotnet 10 just came out[1] with a bunch of solid new shiny that I'm enjoying.

And, as it stands, Dotnet is much further along in the multi-platform game than Swift. As far as I know, none of the Swift-based UI stuff is being ported to, let alone going to be usable on non-Apple platforms.

1. https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/whats-new-in-net-10/

pjmlp3• 9 months ago

Not yet, still release candidate, not the final release.

fuzztester• 9 months ago

The only native contenders in the field right now are IMHO are react native and flutter which are both UI toolkits first and language second

Flutter is not a language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flutter_(software)

From that page:

Flutter apps are written in the Dart language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dart_(programming_language)

hu3• 9 months ago

most know that, it's implied to simplify the phrasing.

just mixing appkit and language in the same phrase implies swift.

keyle• 9 months ago

This is a blessing and a curse. I, for one, preferred Swift from before, when it wasn't hell bent on replacing C++.

It was a simpler Swift, I could understand all of it. Just look at the explosion of keywords in Swift.

isodev• 9 months ago

Swift is a “may you live in interesting times” kind of deal. Not the kind of stress you want in your day job.

pjmlp3• 9 months ago

Aspire, extensions everywhere, field variables, spans as part of the type system, and naturally plenty of AI, isn't fancy enough?

CodeCompost• 9 months ago

I donnow. C# and .NET are amazing. People tend to ignore it because Microsoft, but they are being short-sighted. What shiny things are you missing?

memsom• 9 months ago

The only native contenders in the field right now are IMHO are [...] and flutter

I wouldn't really call Flutter "native".

I don't have a strong enough grasp of where React Native is at now. It was severely lacking when I looked at it circa 2018. But then we needed to call in to our own native code libraries, so we were probably quite niche.

Xamarin.Forms worked well enough, but the transition to MAUI has been full of woe and even more bugs and weird edge case functionality than Xamarin had.

ethin2• 9 months ago

Swift just needs to gain cmake bidirectional support, like, SPM should be able to compile CMake projects and vice-versa, or be able to use vcpkg. Once that's done, I could very much see myself switching to it for a lot of things.

wahnfrieden3• 9 months ago

SPM support for CMake is in progress

ethin2• 9 months ago

I know, and that's a good thing. That's probably one of the biggest blockers for it's wider adoption. I hope that CMake can eventually get similar abilities for calling into SPM or just outright handling Swift package manifests. That might be too much to ask though.

lukeh4• 9 months ago

I did try to build a medium sized project with this today. Still a lot of dependencies that will need to be updated for the differences between glibc and libc.

Swift on FreeBSD Preview

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