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

[Nick Keets]

I think there are two ideas discussed in this thread at the same time. One
is for a more extended standard library, that is developed and shipped as
part of the language. This is similar to what Python, Go and other
languages are doing. The second is for a more wide collection of packages,
developed by 3rd parties and not included with the language. This is
similar to npm, PyPI, etc.

If I understood it correctly, the original proposal is about the first idea
and I don't think an "open market" approach works well for this. As for
what should be included, I find Go to be a nice example, that could be used
as a starting point:

https://golang.org/pkg/

To summarize, it includes:
- archival and compression formats (tar, zip, gzip, ...)
- a few data structures
- cryptographic functions (including hashes and random numbers)
- sqlite and basic database drivers support
- various data encodings (CSV, XML, JSON, ...)
- some stuff used internally by the go tools (AST trees, debugging symbols)
- basic graphics and image support
- basic text and HTML templates
- math and bignums
- networking and HTTP support (client and server)
- OS support (including path handling, command line flags etc)
- Miscellanous stuff like dates, unicode, IO, string parsing, testing, etc.

Go considers all these packages part of the language and offers source
compatibility guarantees for all of them. I find the availability of these
packages and the fact that they are developed and maintained by the Go core
team to be very powerful.

We can debate what should be included and if these should be separate
modules or not, but I think the key insight here is that they are a curated
list of useful libraries that are developed and maintained together with
the language.


On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 9:37 PM, Ted Kremenek via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Nov 8, 2017, at 4:54 AM, Karl Wagner <razielim at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 7, 2017, at 1:58 PM, Ted Kremenek via swift-evolution <
> 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.
>
>
> I agree that the tooling support around SwiftPM is not sufficiently
> advanced yet to support this for everybody.  Further, I don’t think there
> would be a need to preclude other ways to share libraries for this purpose,
> even if the SwiftPM tooling support was more mature.
>
> The primary point I wanted to make was more about the model itself.  I’d
> prefer the community grow up a set of libraries that trialed and used
> before focusing on prematurely baking them into the core Swift distribution.
>
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