Foundation is indeed tightly coupled with the Apple ecosystem; however with the 
movement to open source, I think we are approaching a fork in the 
road regarding this discussion. Like David articulated, Foundation either will 
need to her decoupled from its Apple historical roots or a parallel non-Apple 
Foundation will need to be developed. We all know how difficult and painful it 
is to maintain two different code sets that do mostly the same thing. My humble 
recommendation is that we start looking at decoupling foundation from its roots 
and a good first step would be to remove the NS- prefix. This change would do 
many positive things, including alerting developers that change is coming.

A long-term concern that I have is that if you do not begin the enormous task 
of at least beginning to remove Apple-centric dependencies, then sometime down 
the road someone outside the Apple environment will fork Swift and take it in 
ways out of our control.

In short, I am in favor of at least beginning the move toward removing NS- from 
Foundation.

> On May 8, 2016, at 11:16 AM, Josh Parmenter via swift-evolution 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> David has articulated what I couldn't quite put my finger on, and I agree.
> This also comes around to something I probably missed elsewhere in the 
> discussion- but is the proposal to make NS classes just look like thus don't 
> have NS in Swift? Or is it to write Swift versions of those classes that 
> duplicate the functionality of those classes in Swift (for instance, giving 
> String the full interface of NSString without actually having it call into 
> NSString obj-c code?).
> I tried glancing through the discussion and couldn't really find an answer to 
> this (though I did it quickly, so my apologies if this is an obvious question 
> that has already been answered).
> Best
> Josh
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> On May 8, 2016, at 00:41, David Waite via swift-evolution 
> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> 
> It's not a goal to rewrite Foundation from scratch in Swift. All Swift apps 
> that are running out there today are in fact using a combination of Swift, 
> Objective-C, C, C++, various flavors of assembly, and more. The goal is to 
> present the existing API of Foundation in a way that fits in with the 
> language today while allowing us to iteratively improve it over time.
> 
> Perhaps my concern is a higher level - I don't understand where Foundation is 
> envisioned going.
> 
> From my perspective, Foundation is highly coupled to Apple platforms and 
> Objective-C on one side, and part of the Swift standard library on the other. 
> Perhaps long-term Foundation should be split into two new things - a core 
> library for cross-platform swift development, and the infrastructure for 
> Objective-C interoperability on apple platforms only.
> 
> -DW
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