[swift-evolution] TrigonometricFloatingPoint/MathFloatingPoint protocol?

[Taylor Swift]

On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 1:20 PM, Michael Ilseman <milseman at apple.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Aug 1, 2017, at 8:14 AM, Taylor Swift via swift-evolution <
> swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>
> I’ve noticed from this and older threads that everyone agrees on what core
> libraries we want, but they never actually get built. Perennial requests
> seem to be
>
> - RNG and cryptography library (CryptoSwift could be a good base for this)
>
>
> A new implementation of crypto is probably a very bad idea. A blessed
> wrapping around the platform’s preferred implementation of crypto, however,
> is certainly needed.
>

Good point, but then again CryptoSwift has already demonstrated a demand
for a new Swift implementation and we wouldn’t be starting from scratch.


>
> - Generic Math library/Vector library
>
>
> This is pretty compelling.
>
> - Basic data structures (Tree, Balanced Tree, Heap, Queue, SkipList,
> graphs, etc)
>
>
> Which flavor/implementation of tree, balanced tree, heap, graphs are
> desirable here? The desirability of many of these structures is often
> dependent on which of many competing tradeoffs were made. Implementation
> details can dramatically shape the general applicability of a data
> structure.
>
> For example, it might make sense to adopt something similar to
> https://github.com/lorentey/BTree as a general underlying representation
> for some kinds of higher level collections (or the mechanisms to easily
> adapt them).
>
>
The idea wouldn’t be to cover every possible permutation of these data
structures, but provide implementations for the most commonly used
varieties.


> - Modern DateTime library
>
>
> Foundation provides many of these, though I’m sure there are always
> opportunities for improvement. Do you see a specific need that cannot be
> addressed with improvements to corelibs-foundation? There’s a large amount
> of domain expertise in Foundation and they are pretty active on the mailing
> lists.
>

I’d be happy just with moving the datetime functionality from Foundation
into its own module. I’m really not a fan of the monolith pattern.


>
> - Modern String processing toolkit
>
>
> This is a huge gap in Swift’s current offerings, and I’m personally
> invested in improving the situation here. At the risk of hijacking this
> thread, do you have a good bullet list of the kinds of facilities you
> imagine useful? More specifically (and to keep the discussion scoped), are
> there any tools beyond something like good language support for regular
> expression matching and substitutions?
>
>
Pretty basic but most of what you have to import Foundation to do right
now, plus a few extras.

- trim whitespace from a string
- string formatting
    - round float to n decimal places
    - pad float to n 0s
    - left/right/center pad string with spaces
- locale aware capitalization
- defined CharacterSetsfor things like alphabeticals, numerics, whitespace
chars, etc.
- regex support would be nice
- platform-abstracted terminal colors would be nice

plus a lot of things I’m probably forgetting


> - 2D Graphics library (similar to cairo)
>
> - Windowing/UI library
>
>
> By this, do you mean cross-platform pure Swift rethinks? This is certainly
> interesting, but a pure Swift rethink is likely a lower priority than
> exposing bindings for existing cross-platform approaches (e.g. you
> mentinoed cairo). Like crypto, it might make sense to establish blessed
> wrappers/apinotes/overlays on top of tried-and-true open source offerings.
>

Currently, calling Cairo code from Swift is extremely problematic for
reasons involving memory ownership and object lifetimes. Nothing an
experienced Swift dev can’t get around, but definitely far too ugly a hack
for such a common task. The C library is simply incompatible with Swift’s
memory safety model.


>
> I think David Turnbull tried to get something like this started years back
> but it fizzled out pretty quick, probably because the Swift foss community
> was much smaller back then. Time to try again?
>
> On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 8:29 AM, Georgios Moschovitis <
> george.moschovitis at icloud.com> wrote:
>
>> > That's what's happened with the Server APIs Project
>> > https://swift.org/server-apis/
>> >
>> > I would like to see more of this, and math/BigNum seems like a good
>> candidate.
>> >
>> > Another is a modern date/time package, standing on the shoulders of
>> > https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=310 and similar.
>>
>> + 1
>>
>> I would also love to see standard implementation of Graph data
>> structures, at least some common protocols.
>> Dunno why this versatile data structure is not included in standard
>> libraries (similar to Map/Dictionary), Set, etc.
>>
>> -g.
>
>
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>
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