[swift-evolution] pitch: Unified libc import (again)

Taylor Swift kelvin13ma at gmail.com
Thu Aug 17 11:26:27 CDT 2017


I know this has come up before without any action, but having the standard
C library be packaged under `Darwin` on OSX and `Glibc` under Linux is
something that’s really becoming an issue as the Swift package ecosystem
matures. Right now a lot of packages are a lot less portable than they
could be because somewhere along the dependency line, there is a package
that only imports the C library for one platform. Unifying it under one
import would allow people to write packages that are portable by default.

Since I think this got hung up in the past over “what constitutes” a
universal libc, I propose a unified package should just consist of the
functionality that is common between Darwin and Glibc right now, since
those are the only two supported platforms anyway.

Alternatively, Swift could make it a priority to get basic functionality
like file IO and math functions shipped with the compiler, which would
probably cover 98% of cases where people currently import Darwin/Glibc. A
large portion of the standard C libraries are redundant to the Swift
standard library anyway.
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