[swift-evolution] Dropping NS Prefix in Foundation

[Patrick Smith]

But if the NS- prefix is removed now, then it will make it more painful to have breaking changes down the road. I’d prefer to see breaking changes happen and the introduction of new completely modern APIs. Even just protocols that the NS- Foundation can implement.

Say for example, a FileReferenceProtocol and a URLProtocol, where NSURL could conform to both, but a modern implementation could have two separate concrete struct types. Maybe that’s not feasible.

It’s just a shame to say ‘goodbye Objective-C, hello Swift clean slate’, and then bring Foundation along for the ride as a core part for writing new modern applications.

It would be great in my mind to have a plan to transition to a modern ‘Foundation 2.0’. Say made using Swift 4.0 and its possible concurrency operators. I think that would be the time to drop the NS- prefixes.

> On 9 May 2016, at 3:09 AM, Michael Sheaver via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> Foundation is indeed tightly coupled with the Apple ecosystem; however with the movement to open source, I think we are approaching a fork in the 
> road regarding this discussion. Like David articulated, Foundation either will need to her decoupled from its Apple historical roots or a parallel non-Apple Foundation will need to be developed. We all know how difficult and painful it is to maintain two different code sets that do mostly the same thing. My humble recommendation is that we start looking at decoupling foundation from its roots and a good first step would be to remove the NS- prefix. This change would do many positive things, including alerting developers that change is coming.
> 
> A long-term concern that I have is that if you do not begin the enormous task of at least beginning to remove Apple-centric dependencies, then sometime down the road someone outside the Apple environment will fork Swift and take it in ways out of our control.
> 
> In short, I am in favor of at least beginning the move toward removing NS- from Foundation.
> 
>> On May 8, 2016, at 11:16 AM, Josh Parmenter via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> David has articulated what I couldn't quite put my finger on, and I agree.
>> This also comes around to something I probably missed elsewhere in the discussion- but is the proposal to make NS classes just look like thus don't have NS in Swift? Or is it to write Swift versions of those classes that duplicate the functionality of those classes in Swift (for instance, giving String the full interface of NSString without actually having it call into NSString obj-c code?).
>> I tried glancing through the discussion and couldn't really find an answer to this (though I did it quickly, so my apologies if this is an obvious question that has already been answered).
>> Best
>> Josh
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone
>> 
>> On May 8, 2016, at 00:41, David Waite via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org><mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>>> wrote:
>> 
>> It's not a goal to rewrite Foundation from scratch in Swift. All Swift apps that are running out there today are in fact using a combination of Swift, Objective-C, C, C++, various flavors of assembly, and more. The goal is to present the existing API of Foundation in a way that fits in with the language today while allowing us to iteratively improve it over time.
>> 
>> Perhaps my concern is a higher level - I don't understand where Foundation is envisioned going.
>> 
>> From my perspective, Foundation is highly coupled to Apple platforms and Objective-C on one side, and part of the Swift standard library on the other. Perhaps long-term Foundation should be split into two new things - a core library for cross-platform swift development, and the infrastructure for Objective-C interoperability on apple platforms only.
>> 
>> -DW
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