Proterozoic-Oriented Programming: Swift Evolution

It’s Wednesday, so I’ll be filling these in as they pop up:

Accepted

SE-0124: Int.init(ObjectIdentifier) and UInt.init(ObjectIdentifier) should have a bitPattern: label is accepted. Team writes:

There was very sparse commentary, and all of it was positive.  The core team believes this is an “obvious” proposal.

SE-0121: Remove Optional Comparison Operators is Accepted. Team writes:

Feedback has been universally positive from both the community and the core team, because it eliminates a surprising part of the Swift model at very little utility cost.

SE-0120: Revise partition Method Signature is Accepted. (Yay Nate!) Team writes:

There was very sparse commentary, and all of it was positive.  The one requested change from the discussion is to remove @discardableResult, which has already been made to the proposal.

SE-0116: Import Objective-C id as Swift Any type is Accepted. Team writes:

This proposal was very positively received by the community, and garnered a lot of feedback (which has already been incorporated into the proposal).  This proposal has significant implementation complexity, but the work to build it is nearing completion.  When this lands, there is some risk that we’ll need to revise the design in small ways due to unanticipated effects, but the core team believes it is the right overall design to aim for.

SE-0101: Reconfiguring sizeof and related functions into a unified MemoryLayout struct is Accepted. Team writes:

The proposal has been *accepted*, with a revision to change “MemoryLayout” into an enum with no cases.  The overall feedback was very positive.  The core team did discuss a proposal to move the generic type to each member, but felt that that would increase the verbosity of using the API (since T.self would be required) and would lead to possible confusion in the API (because it wouldn’t be clear whether you were asking for the size of a type, or the size of its metatype).

Rejected

SE-0123: Disallow coercion to optionals in operator arguments is Rejected. Team writes:

The majority of the feedback on this proposal was opposed to it.  While the goal of the proposal is laudable, SE-0121 eliminated the most surprising problem that this proposal aimed to address, and the rest of it (notably the ?? operator) can be addressed in other ways in the Swift 3 timeframe.  The core team recommends that the ?? case be handled by having the compiler produce a warning when the left side of the ?? operator is implicitly promoted to optional.  In the post-Swift 3 timeframe, we can investigate other broader options for solving this problem more generally (e.g. a new parameter attribute).

SE-0119: Remove access modifiers from extensions is Rejected. Team writes:

The majority of the feedback on this proposal was opposed to it, because it eliminated the useful ability to apply access control to a batch of methods and properties.

Withdrawn For Revision

SE-0126: Refactor Metatypes, repurpose T.self and Mirror withdrawn for revision. Team writes:

The authors of SE-0126 have requested that we withdraw the proposal. The idea will be revised, return back to the “pitch” phase, and when that converges, SE-0126 will be revised.

Returned for Revision

SE-0117: Default classes to be non-subclassable publicly returned for a second revision. Team writes:

As with the first round of discussion, the community generated a large number of emails, exploring the various aspects of the proposal.  While many community members agree with the thrust of the proposal, a number of people are concerned with the boilerplate being introduced by the proposal, among other issues.  The core team spent over two and a half hours discussing this topic from first principles, and has come up with a similar-but-different approach that should reduce the boilerplate, while still accomplishing the primary aims of the proposal.  John McCall will be revising the proposal today and we’ll restart a short discussion period about it tomorrow.

In Review

I apologize for the formatting. Swift-Ev no longer lets me cut and paste from schedule.md to add the summaries. I tried cutting and pasting the new format and it didn’t work very well.

SE-0130: Replace repeating Character and UnicodeScalar forms of String.init in review to 7/24. “This proposal suggest replacing String initializers taking Character or UnicodeScalar as a repeating value by a more general initializer that takes a String as a repeating value. This is done to avoid the ambiguities in the current String API, which can be only resolved by explicit casting. It is also proposed to remove one of the String.append APIs to match these changes.”

SE-0128: Change failable UnicodeScalar initializers to failable in review to 7/24 “This proposal aims to change some (ones that are failable) UnicodeScalar initializers from non-failable to failable. i.e. in case a UnicodeScalar can not be constructed, nil is returned. Currently, when one passes an invalid value to the failable UnicodeScalar UInt32 initializer the swift stdlib crashes the program by calling _precondition. This is undesirable if one construct a unicode scalar from unknown input.”

SE-0127: Cleaning up stdlib Pointer and Buffer Routines in review to 7/24. “Update the API to match new API guidelines and remove redundant identifiers.”

SE-0126: Refactor Metatypes, repurpose T.self and Mirror in review to 7/24. “This proposal wants to revise metatypes T.Type, repurpose public T.self notation to return a new Type<T> type instance rather than a metatype, merge SE-0101 into Type<T>, rename the global function from SE-0096 to match the changes of this proposal and finally rename current Mirror type to introduce a new (lazy) Mirror type.”

SE-0117: Allow distinguishing between public access and public overridability revision 3 in review to 7/25 ” A public member will only be usable by other modules, but not overridable. An open member will be both usable and overridable. Similarly, a public class will only be usable by other modules, but not subclassable. An open class will be both usable and subclassable. This spirit of this proposal is to allow one to distinguish these cases while keeping them at the same level of support: it does not adversely affect code that is open, nor does it dissuade one from using open in their APIs. In fact, with this proposal, open APIs are syntactically lighter-weight than public ones.”

SE-0125

to 7/22

Remove NonObjectiveCBase and isUniquelyReferenced

This replacement is as performant as the call to isUniquelyReferenced in cases where the compiler has static knowledge that the type of object is a native Swift class and dyamically has the same semantics for native swift classes. This change will remove surface API.

SE-0124

to 7/20

Int.init(ObjectIdentifier) and UInt.init(ObjectIdentifier) should have a bitPattern: label

This makes it clear at the use site that we interpret the value as a bit pattern

SE-0123

to 7/19

Disallow coercion to optionals in operator arguments

The convenience of coercing values to optionals is very nice in the context of normal function calls, but in the context of operators, it can lead to some strange and unexpected behavior.

SE-0122

to 7/24

Use colons for subscript declarations

Matches accessor declarations elsewhere in the language

SE-0121

to 7/19

Remove Optional Comparison Operators

Doesn’t work in current versions of Swift, because generics don’t support conditional conformances like extension Optional: Comparable where Wrapped: Comparable, so Optional is not actually Comparable.

SE-0120

to 7/19

Revise partition Method Signature

A more general partition algorithm using a unary (single-argument) predicate would be more flexible and generally useful.

SE-0119

to 7/19

Remove access modifiers from extensions

This proposal aims to fix access modifier inconsistency on extensions compared to other scope declarations types.

SE-0117

to 7/22

Default classes to be non-subclassable publicly

Not all classes make sense to subclass, and it takes real thought and design work to make a class subclassable well.

SE-0116

to 7/11

Import Objective-C id as Swift Any type

Objective-C’s id type is currently imported into Swift as AnyObject. This is the intuitive thing to do, but creates a growing tension between idiomatic Objective-C and Swift code.

SE-0101

to 7/19

Reconfiguring sizeof and related functions into a unified MemoryLayout struct

Discards the value-style standalone functions and combines the remaining items into a unified type.

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