Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift (<https://w...

# ios

[leandro]

Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift (https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/). It seem like there will be an Objective-C compatibility layer, but it’s not clear how much this would impact Kotlin/Native.

[darkmoon_uk]

I wonder if this relates to the recent announcement that AppCode is being discontinued. In the Blog post comments JB said the discontinuation wasn't directly about the profitability, of AppCode, but provided no further detail.

My running theory is that JetBrains have found themselves in a position of having to choose between maintaining AppCode; or making Kotlin/Native directly interop with Swift, requiring their best Swift Engineers i.e. the AppCode team... and the latter option won; partly out of knowledge/concern that this Foundation rewrite threatens K/Ns future.

[curioustechizen]

partly out of knowledge/concern that this Foundation rewrite threatens K/Ns future.

That's an interesting take. Why would the Foundation rewrite threaten K/N?

[darkmoon_uk]

Sorry, not all of K/N, the iOS targets specifically, since these rely on ObjC ABI interior to be at all useful

[Rainer Schlonvoigt]

Is this about correct?

FoundationRewrite.drawio.pdf

[darkmoon_uk]

@Rainer Schlonvoigt I see nothing wrong with your diagram part but the present drawback is more than just a performance hit; it's that Swift ABI frameworks cannot be accessed by Kotlin native at all, without being re-presented as ObjC via some wrapper layer. I recently spent at least a few days of a projects creating and then refining such a wrapper, to expose a pure Swift API as Objective C for the purpose of K/N bridging, for example. An increasing number of APIs from Apple are subject to this.... and possibly all of the new ones, I'm not sure. You could say that's a project-scale 'performance hit' 😅

[Rainer Schlonvoigt]

did you scroll to the second one? 😄