[swift-evolution] Winding down the Swift 3 release

[Eric Wing]

On 5/16/16, Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com> wrote:
> On May 16, 2016, at 2:27 PM, Eric Wing via swift-evolution
> <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>>> I'm not an expert in the Linux communities needs and desires.  That
>>> said,
>>> from what I understand, they don’t care at all about ABI stability,
>>> since
>>> everything is typically built from source.
>>
>> Not exactly true. (I care.)
>>
>> Video games (e.g. Steam/Linux) care deeply about ABI stability. And
>> Android cares deeply about ABI stability. Also, kind of emergent
>> behavior, Raspberry Pi Raspbian has kind of built a platform that
>> happens to have some ABI stability for now.
>
> Great to know, and good point.  From that perspective, a Steam/Linux project
> would be in the same category as an iOS or Mac app: ABI stability doesn’t
> matter, so long as you include a copy of the swift standard library along
> with the steam app itself.  I know nothing about Steam, but it seems likely
> that this would have been a requirement anyway, because you can’t count on
> the standard library already existing.
>

Yes. I actually filed some bug reports a few weeks ago for
thoughts/concerns/issues related to this.

> ABI stability starts to matter when you’re interested in combining
> precompiled libraries built by different parties, which are only distributed
> in binary form.
>

That is what I’m working on. I also care about Mac and iOS.

Thanks,
Eric