alt Hacker NewsSwift Package Index joins Apple
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Well I was thinking about making a competitor to SPI because they only support GitHub repo’s.
This news makes it easy. I’m starting the engines on this…
Back when I was following Swift, I was a bit confused by there being 2 distinct sites that seemed to be pretty much the same thing:
Not optimistic here. While I'm glad the SPI guys are getting paid (that is, a full time job), Apple is pretty bad at open source and developer services both, and they explicitly call out developer identity as a future direction, which doesn't fill me with hope.
Glad to see it.
I like the SPM, but it definitely has its "rough edges."
Having an index like this, is great.
However, I guarantee that there will be some caterwaulin', if Apple decides to regulate which packages get indexed (which I think should happen, as it's now an official Apple brand).
Apple has something with Swift similar to what Google has with Go. The language has a lot of desirable features for server development very much like Go and Rust. Especially when compared to Java and C#.
It makes sense for them to build their services using Swift instead of something like Go and the Swift-on-server team has been doing a lot of work to get swift in a usable state on Linux. Having a thriving opensource (starting with a package index) makes a lot of sense to them for that.
My only problem with Swift is personal taste and experience. I tried it on linux few times (admittingly few years ago now) and generally I wasn't a fan. Go and Rust solve all the problems that Swift could have solved for me, so I didn't bother. But just like node got an entire class of developers into server side programming, Swift could be apples approach to get their iOS and MacOS developers a way to easily write server side code in swift as well
kind of surprised Swift didn't launch with this by default, built in-house
And there I was hoping the Swift ecosystem could emancipate itself from Apple instead of getting eaten up.
I guess that explains why Dave Verwer handed off ownership of the iOS Dev Weekly newsletter.
Always great to see community members see success.