babe, wake up, swift has module name selectors

if you don’t know, as of writing this, swift 6.3 has literally just released. it is very nice imo, as previously mentioned.

@c is here!

previously, to expose something to c, you’d need to use the weird @_cdecl attribute:

@_cdecl("greet")
func greet(_ name: StaticString) {
    // and then do some weird stuff to convert from a ptr to a staticstring and put it in `resolvedName`.
    /// ...
    print("Hello, \(resolvedName)!")
}

ew.

luckily, people noticed how weird this was. including me :3 but there were still some problems to be ironed out, such as making sure types could actually be represented in c.

so now we’ve got the newer, fancier, much cooler @c attribute!

@c
func greet(_ name: StaticString) {
    print("Hello, \(name)!")
}

it’s so much cleaner already. oh, and it’s waaay safer.

module name selectors to make code more readable

my biggest pet peeve with swift libraries is when they have a type that has the exact same name as the module (looking at you, drops). like, no, i don’t want to play compiler roulette every time i build cookie clicker clone #2,643,891.

this snippet makes two of the exact same thing:

import Drops

Drops(/* ... */)  // implicitly from the drops module
Drops.Drops(/* ... */)  // explicitly from the drops module

that’s just unnecessarily confusing. especially when you have multiple types with the same name.

now, it’s much easier to specify exactly what type you are referring to:

import Drops

Drops::Drops(/* ... */)  // much more readable!
Drops(/* ... */)  // still a little confusing...

another place this could be useful is specifying a todo-like task v.s. a swift async task. say we’re building an app named Checkmark:

let task = Checkmark::Task(self.title)  // a thing to do
Swift::Task {  // async code to execute
    self.upload(task)
}

it’s just so much cleaner and easier to read in many situations. thanks, swift contributors!

theres smaller stuff too

what would an update be without a billion smaller, helpful things to go along with it? here’s a list of my favorites:

• you can use swift build in swiftpm now
• docc got some new experimental features
  • exporting docs as markdown
  • seo and accessibility got improved because you can have small, static html summaries of each page
  • code blocks can be annotated to enable and disable features and styling
• embedded swift saw lots of small debugging improvements, and is starting to have a more usable toolset and dependency system
• the swift sdk is on android

if you’re interested in swift, or c-inspired langauges, you should absolutely check out the full article on swift.org, especially the stuff on embedded swift. that’s a little out of my pay grade.

thanks for reading my first post! it was fun to write.