If value-based generics become a thing, then you’ll be able to specify a URL 
type with URL<.file> which would pretty much solve this problem.

> On Aug 21, 2017, at 11:24 AM, Félix Cloutier via swift-evolution 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> There's no question that there's a lot in common between file: URLs and other 
> URLs, but that hardly makes URLs better in the file: case.
> 
> I saw the enum. The problem remains that it's a common API principle to 
> accept the broadest possible input. It's not fundamentally wrong to accept 
> and resolve common URL types, as there's a ton of things that need to read 
> documents from the Internet by design. However, if this is the default 
> facility for file handling too, it invents either:
> 
> A responsibility for API users to check that their URL is a file: URL;
> A responsibility for API authors to provide separate entry points for file 
> URLs and remote URLs, and a responsibility for API users to use the right one.
> 
> It would also add a category of errors to common filesystem operations: 
> "can't do this because the URL is not a file: URL", and a category of 
> questions that we arguably shouldn't need to ask ourselves. For instance, 
> what is the correct result of glob()ing a file: URL pattern with a hash or a 
> query string, should each element include that hash/query string too?
> 
> Félix
> 
>> Le 20 août 2017 à 23:33, Taylor Swift <[email protected]> a écrit :
>> 
>> I think that’s more a problem that lies in Foundation methods that take URLs 
>> rather than the URLs themselves. A URL is a useful abstraction because it 
>> contains a lot of common functionality between local file paths and internet 
>> resources. For example, relative URI reference resolution. APIs which take 
>> URLs as arguments should be responsible for ensuring that the URL’s schema 
>> is a `file:`. The new URL type I’m writing actually makes the scheme an enum 
>> with cases `.file`, `.http`, `.https`, `.ftp`, and `.data` to ease checking 
>> this.
>> 
>>> On Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 2:23 AM, Félix Cloutier <[email protected]> 
>>> wrote:
>>> I'm not convinced that URLs are the appropriate abstraction for a file 
>>> system path. For the record, I'm not a fan of existing Foundation methods 
>>> that create objects from an URL. There is a useful and fundamental 
>>> difference between a local path and a remote path, and conflating the two 
>>> has been a security pain point in many languages and frameworks that allow 
>>> it. Examples include remote file inclusion in PHP and malicious doctypes in 
>>> XML. Windows also had its share of issues with UNC paths.
>>> 
>>> Even when loading an arbitrary URL looks innocuous, many de-anonymizing 
>>> hacks work by causing a program to access an URL controlled by an attacker 
>>> to make it disclose the user's IP address or some other identifier.
>>> 
>>> IMO, this justifies that there should be separate types to handle local and 
>>> remote resources, so that at least developers have to be explicit about 
>>> allowing remote resources. This makes a new URL type less necessary towards 
>>> supporting file I/O.
>>> 
>>> Félix
>>> 
>>>> Le 20 août 2017 à 21:37, Taylor Swift via swift-evolution 
>>>> <[email protected]> a écrit :
>>>> 
>>>> Okay so a few days ago there was a discussion about getting pure swift 
>>>> file system support into Foundation or another core library, and in my 
>>>> opinion, doing this requires a total overhaul of the `URL` type (which is 
>>>> currently little more than a wrapper for NSURL), so I’ve just started a 
>>>> pure Swift URL library project at <https://github.com/kelvin13/url>.
>>>> 
>>>> The library’s parsing and validation core (~1K loc pure swift) is already 
>>>> in place and functional; the goal is to eventually support all of the 
>>>> Foundation URL functionality.
>>>> 
>>>> The new `URL` type is implemented as a value type with utf8 storage backed 
>>>> by an array buffer. The URLs are just 56 bytes long each, so they should 
>>>> be able to fit into cache lines. (NSURL by comparison is over 128 bytes in 
>>>> size; it’s only saved by the fact that the thing is passed as a reference 
>>>> type.)
>>>> 
>>>> As I said, this is still really early on and not a mature library at all 
>>>> but everyone is invited to observe, provide feedback, or contribute!
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> swift-evolution mailing list
>>>> [email protected]
>>>> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
>>> 
>> 
> 
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