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

[Saagar Jha]

Just thought I’d link the previous thread on this topic: https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20160704/023927.html <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mon-20160704/023927.html>. I had promised to write a proposal for it back then, but never got around to doing it. Now that we’re out of the hectic Swift 3 timeframe, I can write a proposal and implementation for this, since it’s more likely to be accepted.

More broadly, however, I think a “Swiftication” of POSIX or libc is extremely necessary for anyone who’s not working with Foundation–and not everyone is! There are still parts of POSIX that are either 1. not a part of Foundation or 2. part of Foundation/CoreFoundation but not in the open source Swift Foundation or CFLite (and hence not available on Linux). A big part of attracting newer Swift developers a moving away from the “Swift is for apps only” and the in my experience the need to drop down to UnsafePointer or errno just to use this API has been a big turn-off for programmers.

Saagar Jha

> On Aug 18, 2017, at 04:17, Xiaodi Wu via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> Not “fundamentally” incompatible:
> 
> var stderr = FileHandle.standardError
> /* Conform FileHandle to TextOutputStream */
> print("foo", to: &stderr)
> 
> 
> On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 01:39 Brent Royal-Gordon <brent at architechies.com <mailto:brent at architechies.com>> wrote:
>> On Aug 17, 2017, at 8:20 PM, Xiaodi Wu via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> * stderr should go wherever stdin and stdout go. Since it’d be silly for a function like `print(_:separator:terminator:)` or `readLine(strippingNewline:)` to live anywhere but the standard library, then it stands to reason that the stderr version should also live in the standard library.
>> 
>> FWIW, FileHandle.standardInput, FileHandle.standardError, FileHandle.standardOutput, and FileHandle.nullDevice all live in Foundation.
> 
> And, since they're read-only, are fundamentally incompatible with `print(…to:)`, which requires its `output` parameter to be passed `inout`.
> 
> -- 
> Brent Royal-Gordon
> Architechies
> 
> _______________________________________________
> 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/20170818/32e93852/attachment.html>