Scripting in Swift

by timanglade • 11 years ago

73 28 11 years ago

marvel_boy• 11 years ago

I usually use bash or ruby to do scripting, but I think is a good idea to use the power of Swift to this task.

timanglade• 11 years ago

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.

coldtea• 11 years ago

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.

zw• 11 years ago

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.

seivan• 11 years ago

I recently used someones template tool to generate some methods in Swift but with some erb-like syntax to actual Swift code.

It was actually more pleasant than I thought, and I usually use Ruby for this. Might do this more often in the future.

But Ruby still has the benefit with gem install that can get you anything from a twitter client to an IRC-bot lib.

melling• 11 years ago

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":

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/

tkubacki• 11 years ago

Will Apple ship Swift as OS on Linux this year as they promised ?

Redoubts• 11 years ago

Probably? This article doesn't address that one way or the other.

Someone2• 11 years ago

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)

dottrap3• 11 years ago

In the big WWDC keynote, they said they wanted to help kick things off with a Linux port this year.

evanriley• 11 years ago

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?

dottrap3• 11 years ago

Based on prior Apple behavior, they will first ship iOS and OS X, and then they do all their open source drops after the releases.

Presumably, new iOS and OS X will ship this fall, so the open source drops will come soon after. Hopefully fall, but winter at the latest.

tempodox3• 11 years ago

... Swift as OS...

Whatever does that mean? Swift is not an operating system.

pavlov• 11 years ago

I think OS == Open Source in this case.

MrGando3• 11 years ago

IMHO This is a pretty bad idea right now... I just had to port a swift "scripting" project to Python a month ago.

lmedinas• 11 years ago

Why?

MrGando3• 11 years ago

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.

mdevere• 11 years ago

Cool to see Swift being used outside of XCode

tempodox3• 11 years ago

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.

LewisJEllis• 11 years ago

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.

Scripting in Swift

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