On Jan 1, 2016, at 12:56 PM, Trent Nadeau <[email protected]> wrote:
> Speaking of release cadence, do you think that Swift could transition to the 
> release train model (i.e., staged release, beta, and nightly) once source and 
> ABI compatibility are both established? That would allow a quicker cadence 
> and more testing of new library and language features. It's seems to be 
> working well with Rust so far, at least.

Anything is possible, we’re always open to good ideas.

-Chris

> 
> On Fri, Jan 1, 2016 at 3:46 PM, Chris Lattner via swift-evolution 
> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> On Dec 31, 2015, at 2:54 PM, Erica Sadun via swift-evolution 
> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> > Under what criteria should we propose moving items into the standard 
> > library and out from the standard library into Swift Foundation? Or will 
> > these things eventually merge and become one grand unified module sometime 
> > in the distant future?
> 
> Hi Erica,
> 
> I don’t see any specific reason to merge the stdlib and Foundation together - 
> it seems like Foundation depending on the swift stdlib is proper layering.  
> Lets look at the mission of both of these libraries:
> 
> For the Swift standard library, we want it to stay focused on the 
> lowest-level “language support” primitives that includes things like Int, 
> Array, Dictionary, OptionSet and the stuff they depend on (sequences etc).  
> Even though they are implemented in the stdlib, I consider to be part of the 
> the language.  While we may elect to allow some minor scope creep, this will 
> be carefully scrutinized and needs to be strongly justified.
> 
> For Foundation, there may be differing short-term and long-term answers here. 
>  In the short-term, the corelibs projects have a very specific focus, which 
> is to enable cross-platform Swift development by making common Foundation 
> APIs available on other platforms.  This is a pretty huge project, so it is 
> important that we keep focused on making this happen, even though folks have 
> the natural inclination to do “new” things as well.
> 
> In this short term, I see SwiftPM as a great solution to avoid having to cram 
> “everything interesting” into the standard library or Foundation.  Once 
> SwiftPM is ready, there should be very little downside to something being a 
> package hosted on github or elsewhere.
> 
> 
> In the longer term, we’ll have to see what happens, and make a decision that 
> makes sense given the direction the project takes.  We may decide to start 
> adding new functionality to Foundation that doesn’t exist on Apple platforms 
> yet (with the understanding that they will adopt it as well).  We may decide 
> to “standardize” new corelibs from existing popular packages, if they are 
> outside of the scope of Foundation (totally random example: perhaps a web 
> templating framework).
> 
> Putting something into the standard Swift distribution (instead of it being 
> an independent package) comes with pros and cons.  On the positive side, we 
> want an official Swift release (e.g. "Swift 3.0”) to provide a consistent set 
> of APIs out of the box that are guaranteed to be there.  Getting your cool 
> thing into the Swift distro guarantees that it will be available everywhere.  
> On the downside, this is a bad way to go for rapidly evolving APIs in 
> multiple ways: first, Swift has relatively infrequent updates (e.g. twice a 
> year at current cadence) so it will take a long time to get changes out.  
> Second, *changing* an API included in the Swift distribution will be 
> comparatively hard.  Instead of bumping the major version number of a 
> package, it will have to go through a (TBD) lengthy deprecation process that 
> will likely span multiple years.
> 
> In any case, we’ll figure it out as we go.  We don’t have all the answers, 
> and we’re learning too.
> 
> -Chris
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Trent Nadeau

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