[swift-evolution] VisualFoundation Framework

[Jonathan Hull]

Hi Everyone,

I am not sure whether Swift Evolution’s charter extends to the common foundation framework which will be distributed with Swift (If not, then I hope this request reaches the right people).

I would like to see another open framework distributed with Foundation that holds common base UI related objects.  Mainly Color, AttributedString, and Image.  I have a lot of code that needs to include UIKit or Cocoa only because of these 3 classes (NS/UIColor, etc…).  It would be extremely helpful to be able to use the same code for these across platforms, but they are all visual ideas, and thus are not included in Foundation.  If we had a small framework for visual base classes that sits above foundation, a large portion of my code would port to Linux and Windows (if that ends up happening) without changes.  This would NOT include platform specific ideas like Views or windows… just the basics of things that are meant to be cross-platform like color, image, and styled text.  UIKit and Cocoa would then import this framework and alias NS/UIColor, etc… to it (or at least make them interoperate).

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Jon