The designers of Swift seem to have really odd opinions regarding the merits of certain patterns that are very common across other languages. For example, they have deemed that the prefix and postfix operators "++" and "--" are, for some reason, not desirable. Weird. 🧐 Not a biggie because they also built Swift with the … Continue reading Bringing Back Some Old Friends
macOS
Let’s all meet on the Playground!
Learning Swift is a lot easier thanks to Playgrounds!
Byte Level File I/O in Swift
So, one of the first things I wanted to do in Swift was to start to port the Java model of XML over to Swift. But to do that I needed to be able to read the XML files as a series of bytes so that I could convert all the various character encodings (UTF-8, … Continue reading Byte Level File I/O in Swift
Swift – First Impressions
After playing with Swift a bit here are my first impressions of the language. There is definitely a lot to like about it! There's also a few things that annoy me. 😎 But first I'll start out with a giving you a 1,000 foot overview of the language itself. Syntax aside, Swift and Objective-C 2.0 (as … Continue reading Swift – First Impressions
Taking the Swift Plunge
Okay... So... I think I'm finally ready to take the plunge and start learning the Swift Programming Language in earnest. I've been watching it and starting with version 5 there is finally enough there for me to get excited about. But this isn't going to be easy for me. Not like it was when I … Continue reading Taking the Swift Plunge
Rubicon
I've made a major milestone in my personal project Rubicon. I've gotten it where it will build on Linux as well as Mac OS X. More info is in the readme file. Check it out: https://github.com/GalenRhodes/Rubicon
Always an Easier Way
Previously in Avoiding an Objective-C Pitfall #1 I discussed a more stable way of creating singletons in Objective-C. As with all things in the world of Apple there's always an easier way and that way comes to us via two very powerful yet unnoticed (in the Windows and Linux communities at least) APIs that Apple has contributed to … Continue reading Always an Easier Way
Avoiding an Objective-C Pitfall #1
Below is a very commonly used design pattern in Objective-C. It's the typical Objective-C "Singleton Pattern" because it does just that. Returns a singleton of the class it belongs to. If we take a look at an example that uses it we can see it in action. The "@synchronized(self)" statement ensures that only one thread at a … Continue reading Avoiding an Objective-C Pitfall #1
Thoughts on GNUstep
For those that don't know GNUstep is a project that started many years ago to help bring Objective-C to the masses using operating systems other than Mac OS X macOS. Actually, Objective-C already existed on any platform that had access to the GCC compiler suite but what GNUstep sought to do was bring the primary … Continue reading Thoughts on GNUstep