7 ms·

>The string processing is powerful, but inconvenient when you want to do things like indexing by offsets or ranges, due to Unicode semantics. (This is probably

by kris-s 9mo ago

>The string processing is powerful, but inconvenient when you want to do things like indexing by offsets or ranges, due to Unicode semantics. (This is probably a good thing in general.) This is being too generous to Swift's poorly designed String API. The author gets into it immediately after the quote with an Array<Character> workaround, regex issues, and later Substring pain. It's not a fatal flaw, a language backed by one of the richest companies in the world can have few fatal flaws, but AoC in particular shines a light on it. I really like Swift as an application/games language but I think it unlikely it can ever escape that domain.

frizlab 9mo ago
> poorly designed String API I wholeheartedly disagree and counterpoint that all other String APIs are wrong (bold statement, I know). Accessing a random index of a String is a complex (slow) operation, and as such, should be reflected as complex in the code, especially since people usually think it is not complex. If you want an array of UInt8, just use that. The part about the regex I agree with. They are slow and that’s a shame. I do not personally use regex much though, and don’t think it should be done much in prod either, unless there are no other options, but that does not excuse a poor implementation. Regarding the domain, I recognize it seems to have difficulties escaping the “native iOS/macOS apps,” but IMHO it should not. It is a language that is simple to use, with a reasonable memory handling default (ARC), though it can also use the memory ownership model of rust. Generally speaking using Swift is possible everywhere. I use it personally for an app (native and web front, and back), and it is extremely cool. Its ecosystem is also becoming quite interesting. Most of the libs are from Apple, yes, but they are also very qualitative. All in all I think it’s shame Swift is not more used overall in the industry.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
happytoexplain 9mo ago
> poorly designed String API Nope nope nope. I have to agree strongly with my sibling commenter. Every other language gets it horribly wrong. In app dev (Swift's primary use case), strings are most often semantically sequences of graphemes. And, if you at all care about computer science, array subscripting must be O(1). Swift does the right thing for both requirements. Beautiful. OK, yes, maybe they should add a native `nthCharacter(n:)`, but that's nitpicking. It's a one-liner to add yourself.
- tialaramex 9mo ago
  I don't think Rust gets this horribly wrong. &str is some bytes which we've agreed are UTF-8 encoded text. So, it's not a sequence of graphemes, though it does promise that it could be interpreted that way, and it is a sequence of bytes but not just any bytes. In Rust "AbcdeF"[1] isn't a thing, it won't compile, but "AbcdeF"[1..=1] says we want the UTF-8 substring starting from byte 1 through to byte 1 and that compiles, and it'll work because that string does have a valid UTF-8 substring there, it's "b" -- However it'll panic if we try to "€300"[1..=1] because that's no longer a valid UTF-8 substring, that's nonsense. For app dev this is too low level, but it's nice to have a string abstraction that's at home on a small embedded device where it doesn't matter that I can interpret flags, or an emoji with appropriate skin tones, or whatever else as a distinct single grapheme in Unicode, but we would like to do a bit better than "Only ASCII works in this device" in 2025.
  - zzo38computer 9mo ago
    You can do better than "only ASCII works in this device", and making the default string type to be Unicode is the wrong way to do that. For some applications, you might not need to interpret text at all, or you might need to only interpret ASCII text even if the text is not necessarily purely ASCII; other times you will want to do other things, but Unicode is not a very good character set (there are others but what is appropriate will depend much on the specific application in use; sometimes none are appropriate), and even if you are using Unicode you still don't need a Unicode string type, and you do not need it to check for valid UTF-8 for every string operation by default, because that will result in inefficiency.
    - tialaramex 9mo ago
      In 1995 what you describe isn't crazy. Who knows if this "Unicode" will go anywhere. In 2005 it's rather old-fashioned. There's lots of 8859-1 and cp1252 out there but people aren't making so much of it, and Unicode aka 10646 is clearly the future. In 2015 it's a done deal. Here we are in 2025. Stop treating non-Unicode text as anything other than an aberration. You don't need checks "for every string operation". You need a properly designed string type.
amomchilov 9mo ago
FWIW, AoC is very non-representative of real-world string manipulation problems. The AoC format goes out of its way to express all problem inputs and outputs in simple strings with only basic ASCII text, just for compatibility with the most programming environments. This is very different from almost all real-world problem, where the complexities of human language are huge.

by kris-s 9mo ago

frizlab 9mo ago

> poorly designed String API I wholeheartedly disagree and counterpoint that all other String APIs are wrong (bold statement, I know). Accessing a random index of a String is a complex (slow) operation, and as such, should be reflected as complex in the code, especially since people usually think it is not complex. If you want an array of UInt8, just use that. The part about the regex I agree with. They are slow and that’s a shame. I do not personally use regex much though, and don’t think it should be done much in prod either, unless there are no other options, but that does not excuse a poor implementation. Regarding the domain, I recognize it seems to have difficulties escaping the “native iOS/macOS apps,” but IMHO it should not. It is a language that is simple to use, with a reasonable memory handling default (ARC), though it can also use the memory ownership model of rust. Generally speaking using Swift is possible everywhere. I use it personally for an app (native and web front, and back), and it is extremely cool. Its ecosystem is also becoming quite interesting. Most of the libs are from Apple, yes, but they are also very qualitative. All in all I think it’s shame Swift is not more used overall in the industry.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

happytoexplain 9mo ago

> poorly designed String API Nope nope nope. I have to agree strongly with my sibling commenter. Every other language gets it horribly wrong. In app dev (Swift's primary use case), strings are most often semantically sequences of graphemes. And, if you at all care about computer science, array subscripting must be O(1). Swift does the right thing for both requirements. Beautiful. OK, yes, maybe they should add a native `nthCharacter(n:)`, but that's nitpicking. It's a one-liner to add yourself.

tialaramex 9mo ago
I don't think Rust gets this horribly wrong. &str is some bytes which we've agreed are UTF-8 encoded text. So, it's not a sequence of graphemes, though it does promise that it could be interpreted that way, and it is a sequence of bytes but not just any bytes. In Rust "AbcdeF"[1] isn't a thing, it won't compile, but "AbcdeF"[1..=1] says we want the UTF-8 substring starting from byte 1 through to byte 1 and that compiles, and it'll work because that string does have a valid UTF-8 substring there, it's "b" -- However it'll panic if we try to "€300"[1..=1] because that's no longer a valid UTF-8 substring, that's nonsense. For app dev this is too low level, but it's nice to have a string abstraction that's at home on a small embedded device where it doesn't matter that I can interpret flags, or an emoji with appropriate skin tones, or whatever else as a distinct single grapheme in Unicode, but we would like to do a bit better than "Only ASCII works in this device" in 2025.
- zzo38computer 9mo ago
  You can do better than "only ASCII works in this device", and making the default string type to be Unicode is the wrong way to do that. For some applications, you might not need to interpret text at all, or you might need to only interpret ASCII text even if the text is not necessarily purely ASCII; other times you will want to do other things, but Unicode is not a very good character set (there are others but what is appropriate will depend much on the specific application in use; sometimes none are appropriate), and even if you are using Unicode you still don't need a Unicode string type, and you do not need it to check for valid UTF-8 for every string operation by default, because that will result in inefficiency.
  - tialaramex 9mo ago
    In 1995 what you describe isn't crazy. Who knows if this "Unicode" will go anywhere. In 2005 it's rather old-fashioned. There's lots of 8859-1 and cp1252 out there but people aren't making so much of it, and Unicode aka 10646 is clearly the future. In 2015 it's a done deal. Here we are in 2025. Stop treating non-Unicode text as anything other than an aberration. You don't need checks "for every string operation". You need a properly designed string type.

amomchilov 9mo ago

FWIW, AoC is very non-representative of real-world string manipulation problems. The AoC format goes out of its way to express all problem inputs and outputs in simple strings with only basic ASCII text, just for compatibility with the most programming environments. This is very different from almost all real-world problem, where the complexities of human language are huge.