On Nov 8, 2017, at 4:54 AM, Karl Wagner <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> On Nov 7, 2017, at 1:58 PM, Ted Kremenek via swift-evolution
>> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> 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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