[swift-evolution] Pitch: Progress Tracking in Swift

[cocoadev at charlessoft.com]

On 2016-01-18 23:34, Félix Cloutier wrote:
>>> Also, the first two arguments have merit, but it's highly
>>> improbable
>>> that you'll be able to use whatever solution we come up with in
>>> OSes
>>> older than OS X 10.11 or iOS 9 anyway.
>> 
>> All additions to Swift so far have been back-portable to 10.9, given
>> that the runtime gets bundled into the app.
> 
> I'm not at Apple, but my gut feeling is that it won't be possible for
> much longer, given that Swift 3 should stabilize the ABI and make
> bundling unnecessary.

This is OT, but I don't think that will happen for a while, for the 
basic reason that if Apple removed bundling, it would break not only 
10.9 and 10.10, but 10.11 as well, since none of the currently-shipping 
OS X (or iOS) releases include the Swift runtime or standard library. 
We'd be looking at forcing a minimum requirement of 10.12 at the 
earliest, which I'd expect most developers wouldn't be ready to target 
for quite some time.

My expectation is that once the ABI has been stabilized, and the runtime 
and stdlib have been bundled with some OS version (let's say 10.12), 
Xcode will switch to leaving out the runtime if you target 10.12 or 
later, and bundle them if you target something earlier.

Charles