We apologize for the inconvenience. The OS X and iOS architecture transitions demonstrate the two fundamental laws of ABI changes:
- Opportunities to break ABI compatibility are rare.
- Any opportunity to break ABI compatibility will suffer from severe schedule pressure.
The Objective-C ABIs have many problems that would have been improved with more time.
- We tried to get a “modern” ABI into i386, but the schedule was too tight and we lost time with some initial design ideas that didn’t pan out. x86_64 was also a tight schedule, but much of the work was already in place from the i386 attempt so we were able to get it done.
- Fixing BOOL was repeatedly not quite high enough priority.
- The 64-bit metadata structures have at least one field that is 64-bit by accident (protocol_list_t.count). There was miscommunication between the compiler and the runtime when the design was specified, and then it was never high enough priority to coordinate a fix later.
- armv7 uses setjmp-longjmp exceptions instead of “zero-cost” exceptions because that’s what GCC’s arm compiler used then and we didn’t have time to change it.
- The very first iPhone did not use a “modern” ABI. We knew we could break ABI compatibility at any time before 3rd party apps were supported, so we punted ABI modernization until after 1.0.
- Non-fragile ivars on iPhone had a fragility bug in the compiler. (You don’t see non-fragile ivars doing their thing until the *second* release, except for deliberate testing. We didn’t test enough.) Luckily the bad case was narrow and the miscompiled code was detectable by inspecting binaries in the App Store, so we were able to ask all of the affected apps to recompile with a fixed compiler before the next iPhoneOS version shipped.
If we tried to rush Swift ABI stability out the door for Swift 3 we would certainly end up with deliberate or accidental flaws like the above. Being able to take the time to get it right is a rare luxury.
4 Comments
They can take as long as they want, in order to get it right, as far as I’m concerned. There’s absolutely no need to rush this. Nobody is absolutely depending on Swift 3 or 4 for their work. We can, and are, using Objective-C and/or Swift 2 to do what we need right now.
And really, I’d much prefer Apple spent a fraction of this effort back on Xcode, particularly IB. Or the Finder… or the horrible mess that is iTunes. Or Swift as the Mac’s key scripting/automation language. Or modernising the entire API for adaptive view controllers on iOS (the Size Class system is just terrible in practice.) etc.
This is not just about Apple any more though.
True, but it’s still 99% Apple. They are the agenda setter here, and what they say, goes. It’s ironic that the primary development platform for iOS (the Mac) has lagged behind so far. Going back to Cocoa development after iOS 9 is really painful, particularly when it comes to UI. Even the the web, with its hodgepodge of technologies, has advanced far beyond AppKit, in terms of time-to-build and versatility.
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