atfoundation

atfoundation is a relatively small replacement for Apple’s Foundation extension to the Swift standard library.

The current problem with Apple’s Foundation is that they want to follow the OS X APIs that Foundation delivers there. That is wirtten mostly in Objective C which is not available on Linux, so they are in fact re-implementing Foundation in Swift by copying the complete API interface over to Linux.

As this is an immense task it is not nearly finished yet. In my opinion they made the mistake to stub the complete API interface they want to recreate by defining all of the interfaces and then throwing a fatal “Not Implemented yet” error when you call that interface. As you can imagine that is totally unusable when you rely on an API that is working only to see that your program runs fine on OSX and crashes on Linux.

Furthermore by copying the interface from Objective C, the API may look familiar if you’re coming from there, but sticks out like a sore thumb if you approach it from the direction of the Swift standard library (though they made some mistakes there too.)

atfoundation tries to fill in for Foundation. The philosopy behind atfoundation is to be small, readable, swifty and complete, which means every interface you can see actually works.

How to use

If you’re already using AnarchyTools simply add atfoundation to your dependencies:

(package

  ...

   :external-packages [
     {
        :url "https://github.com/AnarchyTools/atfoundation.git"
        :version [ "1.0.0" ]
     }
   ]

  ...

   :tasks {
     :default {
           :tool "atllbuild"

          ...

           :link-with ["atfoundation.a"]
           :dependencies ["atfoundation.atfoundation"]
     }
   }
)

and import it in your source files:

import atfoundation

Remove the c standard library dance, if you have something like:

#if os(Linux)
     import Glibc
#else
     import Darwin
#endif

just remove that as atfoundation implicitly imports that for you.