[swift-evolution] Large Proposal: Non-Standard Libraries

[Karl Wagner]

> On Nov 7, 2017, at 1:58 PM, Ted Kremenek via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
> 
> FWIW, Ben Cohen and I have been talking about possibly using Swift packages as a way to seed out experimental ideas for extensions to the Standard Library.  This would allow ideas to be trialed by real usage (a complaint I’ve seen about some changes we’ve made to Swift in the past).  Users could build things on top of those libraries, knowing they are available as packages, and if an API “graduates” to being part of the Standard Library the user can then depend upon it being available there.  If it never graduates, however, the package remains around.

Yeah this is exactly the problem that the package manager is there to solve, right? It’s supposed to make it ridiculously easy to integrate libraries and manage your dependencies.

The problem is that most people writing Swift code every day are doing it to make graphical applications on iOS/macOS. SwiftPM doesn’t support those, so if I want to test a library, it’s just a one-off thing that I play with in a Playground.

I think that the best thing we could do to encourage people to write, use and contribute to public libraries would be to improve the package manager. SwiftPM is still basically a toy (or an interesting curiosity), until it can actually be used in the projects most Swift devs get paid to work on every day. Talking about it supporting a community is way premature; it’s not even close to ready to taking on that responsibility, IMO.

- Karl
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