[swift-evolution] [Review] SE-0159: Fix Private Access Levels

Fri Mar 24 23:48:50 CDT 2017

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 11:36 PM, Carl Brown1 <Carl.Brown1 at ibm.com> wrote:

> First off, SE-0159 does not, in my opinion and the opinions of many people
> on this list, present a superior experience for the end user.
>
That is precisely the topic of this review process.

> It removes a feature that many people use and will create more confusion
> by rendering many online tutorials and answered questions incorrect.
>
> Furthermore, the assertion that there is a "knowable" amount of effort
> required to "roll back" corelibs-foundation is laughable. "Look, it
> compiles" is nowhere near the level of rigor required for a code base that
> has as much code depending on it as Foundation has. Remember that the
> standard for corelibs-foundation is not even "it works." The standard is:
> "behaves the same way on Linux that Foundation does on Darwin." If
> something is accessible on Linux but not on Darwin, that's a bug, and needs
> to get fixed. Testing, finding, and fixing the regressions the "roll back"
> will cause is what constitutes the bulk of the effort, and that amount of
> effort cannot possibly be accurately estimated.
>
Agreed on the standard, but neither here nor there. First, `private` vs.
`fileprivate` by definition cannot change the external API. Second, the
migration from Swift 2 to 3 was an essentially equal and opposite effort,
and in those portions of the code, restoring the original version is just
as likely to fix regressions as migrating newer code is to introduce new
ones. Third, any broadening of access from `private` to `fileprivate` that
does not result in an invalid redeclaration (always flagged by the
compiler) is, unless I'm mistaken, unable to change the behavior of
otherwise unmodified code.

>
> -Carl
>
>
> [image: Inactive hide details for Xiaodi Wu via swift-evolution
> ---03/24/2017 10:48:09 PM---As Chris has said in the past, the core tea]Xiaodi
> Wu via swift-evolution ---03/24/2017 10:48:09 PM---As Chris has said in the
> past, the core team is willing to endure a substantial amount of implementa
>
> From: Xiaodi Wu via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org>
> To: Drew Crawford <drew at sealedabstract.com>, Jonathan Hull <jhull at gbis.com
> >
> Cc: swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org>
> Date: 03/24/2017 10:48 PM
> Subject: Re: [swift-evolution] [Review] SE-0159: Fix Private Access Levels
> Sent by: swift-evolution-bounces at swift.org
> ------------------------------
>
>
>
> As Chris has said in the past, the core team is willing to endure a
> substantial amount of implementation pain to present a superior experience
> for the end user. In any case, I expect that the work needed to roll back
> SE-0025 in the core libraries will likely be comparable if not less than
> the remaining ongoing work needed in the compiler to make SE-0025 work
> fully. Certainly, hundreds of hours would not be required to roll back
> corelibs-foundation alone. The exact effort required is knowable, too, as
> one can fork and migrate all uses of private to fileprivate right now and
> see how long it takes.
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 22:38 Drew Crawford via swift-evolution <
> *swift-evolution at swift.org* <swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>
>
>
>    On March 24, 2017 at 10:21:17 PM, Jonathan Hull (*jhull at gbis.com*
>    <jhull at gbis.com>) wrote:
>    This is exactly the problem. Both for access controls and dispatch.
>
>    How would you respond to clattner's *position piece*
>    <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20151207/001948.html> on
>    this?  He disputes this point directly:
>    Swift is another case of a hybrid model: its semantics provide
>          predictability between obviously static (structs, enums, and global funcs)
>          and obviously dynamic (classes, protocols, and closures) constructs.  A
>          focus of Swift (like Java and Javascript) is to provide an apparently
>          simple programming model.  However, Swift also intentionally "cheats" in
>          its global design by mixing in a few tricks to make the dynamic parts of
>          the language optimizable by a static compiler in many common cases...
>          The upshot of this is that Swift isn’t squarely in either of the
>          static or dynamic camps: it aims to provide a very predictable performance
>          model (someone writing a bootloader or firmware can stick to using Swift
>          structs and have a simple guarantee of no dynamic overhead or runtime
>          dependence) while also providing an expressive and clean high level
>          programming model - simplifying learning and the common case where
>          programmers don’t care to count cycles.
>
>          Is it?  Can you point to an instance where a member of the core
>          team said they are aiming for “plenty of overlap”?
>          See above
>       Honestly, most of your examples could just be split into multiple
>          files.
>       Specific arguments were advanced in those examples that they
>    cannot.  Can you refute them?
>       You are conflating effort by the swift design and implementation
>          community with your personal effort around migration.
>       No, I am referencing a Swift at IBM developer who reported that
>       the open-source version of Foundation still has a long way to go to
>          get the level of quality of the existing Objective-C frameworks, and we
>          already have enough work to do without having to go make a bunch of
>          arbitrary changes and risk a bunch of regressions because someone doesn't
>          like a keyword... Accepting this proposal would waste hundreds of
>          person-hours of work...
>       _______________________________________________
>    swift-evolution mailing list
> *swift-evolution at swift.org* <swift-evolution at swift.org>
> *https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution*
>    <https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution>
>    _______________________________________________
>    swift-evolution mailing list
>    swift-evolution at swift.org
>    https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
>
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20170324/04e70a8e/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: graycol.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 105 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20170324/04e70a8e/attachment.gif>