[swift-evolution] Remove prefixes from all Apple frameworks

[Adrian Zubarev]

By an alias what I really meant was some kind of a macro like NS_SWIFT_NAME for types and the module name.



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Adrian Zubarev
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Am 30. März 2017 um 23:19:51, Louis D'hauwe (louisdhauwe at silverfox.be) schrieb:

Aliases would be one step towards my vision, but long term I'd like to see a class like "UIViewController" to be imported as "ViewController".

On 30 Mar 2017, at 23:17, Adrian Zubarev <adrian.zubarev at devandartist.com> wrote:

Typo: I actually meant type- and module-alias.




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Am 30. März 2017 um 23:16:14, Adrian Zubarev (adrian.zubarev at devandartist.com) schrieb:

Something like a type- and type-alias when importing from Obj-C to Swift?

That would be reasonable, I’d guess.



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Adrian Zubarev
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Am 30. März 2017 um 23:12:30, Louis D'hauwe (louisdhauwe at silverfox.be) schrieb:

I disagree, my proposal is not to rename Apple frameworks. 
It is to improve the importing of Objective-C designed frameworks to remove the unnecessary prefixes.

– Louis D'hauwe

On 30 Mar 2017, at 23:07, Adrian Zubarev <adrian.zubarev at devandartist.com> wrote:

The issue is, this has nothing to do with swift evolution. You could file a bug report for the Apple frameworks, but I doubt something this huge will make it through.




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Am 30. März 2017 um 23:03:52, Louis D'hauwe via swift-evolution (swift-evolution at swift.org) schrieb:

Apple frameworks contain prefixes, carried over from Objective-C.
These exist to prevent class and method name collisions.

Mattt Thompson has a great article about this, containing the following brilliant excerpt:
"Namespacing is the preeminent bugbear of Objective-C. A cosmetic quirk with global implications, the language’s lack of identifier containers remains a source of prodigious quantities of caremad for armchair language critics." (http://nshipster.com/namespacing/)

Since Swift can handle with these naming conflicts, wouldn't it make sense to drop all framework prefixes in a Swift environment?

A classic example is UIKit, where all classes are prefixed with "UI". 
Code example:

    import UIKit

    class FooViewController: UIViewController {

    }

Dropping the prefix would simply lead to the following:

    import UIKit

    class FooViewController: ViewController {

    }

Since conflicts need to be handled by specifying the module name, the following could be used if "ViewController" was also used by either some, other than UIKit, imported framework or by a user defined class:

    import UIKit

    class FooViewController: UIKit.ViewController {

    }

"UIKit.ViewController" is of course quite longer than the current "UIViewController".
An improvement could be to allow frameworks to specify an abbreviated form.
UIKit could define "UI" as its abbreviation, making the following code valid:

    import UI

    class FooViewController: UI.ViewController {

    }

This all seems to me like a natural continuation of SE-0086.
I do realise this would be a major change, breaking pretty much every Swift iOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS project.
But in the long term, I think it's worth it.

– Louis D'hauwe

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