Re: [Thought experiment] Bringing swift into an experimental branch?

On Mon, Jun 16, 2025, 5:33 PM Rob Wing <rob.fx907@gmail.com> wrote:

> can someone (who was around at the time) school us  on why perl was
> removed from base?


Short summary: Evolved too quickly, so stable branches were hard; A lot of
work to keep up to date; A real ecosystem that should have had parts
imported, but that was impractical; and conflicts with port installed
versions.


and why introducing language XYZ won’t suffer the same issues/fate?
>

Indeed. That's always the question. But we have external toolchain support
now that would help.

Warner

On Monday, June 16, 2025, Tomek CEDRO <tomek@cedro.info> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jun 17, 2025 at 12:05 AM Jordan Hubbard
>> <jordan.hubbard@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I know that the topic of “bringing additional languages” into OSes is
>> controversial and, frankly, we made a bad call with macOS when we brought
>> the kitchen sink in (everything from Tcl to Python) and regretted it
>> afterwards, so this is just a thought experiment, as noted in the subject.
>> >
>> > All that said, I think a more modern language than C++ being readily
>> available has a useful way of shifting development and generating some
>> excitement, and a modern language that is also strongly supported by your
>> existing clang / LLVM compiler toolchain represents an increment along the
>> same evolutionary path.  It’s also a language that needs a number of
>> components to be tightly in sync (libdispatch, clang, llvm, various
>> compilation tools and libraries, etc) before any 3rd party developer can
>> even compile it for FreeBSD, so saying “it’s a ports collection problem”
>> may ultimately work, but not without considerable pain, as evidenced by the
>> fact that ports/lang/swift does not exist.
>> >
>> > Why swift, if anything?
>> >
>> > Python changes too often in incompatible ways and Rust is still going
>> through its Rust foundation stewardship changes (that didn’t form until
>> 2021) plus if you bring Rust in, you’ll be immediately enmeshed in the
>> “should we just rewrite the kernel in rust?!” topics that seem to plague
>> Linux.   Swift, on the other hand, is an application and service
>> development language and sits nicely on top of what FreeBSD already has -
>> nobody’s going to push to rewrite the kernel or base utilities in Swift,
>> but you do get access to a very active community and, of course, the
>> backing of a major player like Apple and the open source swift ecosystem.
>> >
>> > I’m told that Swift also just announced support for FreeBSD, so if
>> there is ever a time, this might be it?
>> > - Jordan
>>
>> There is nothing wrong with resurrecting lang/swift in the ports [1],
>> this may bring Swift lovers to FreeBSD make it base for their servers
>> / platforms / devices (maybe even porting macOS/iOS applications???),
>> just as it is with any other programming language already here (i.e.
>> Python), people will have choice whether use it or not with zero
>> impact on the kernel / base :-)
>>
>> The problem was with "dump old bad C and rewrite everything in Swift
>> just to get modern" because we clearly do not want to rewrite kernel /
>> base in Swift :D :D
>>
>> [1] https://www.freshports.org/lang/swift/
>>
>> --
>> CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info
>>
>>