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by tialaramex 4 hours ago
The same condition is still true as the first time I was told "Swift on Linux" is somehow a first class experience:

> Documentation for the standard library is presently hosted on the Apple Developer website.

Sure enough, by Apple policy, the documentation pretends no non-Apple platforms exist. What happens for an API which could be different if your system isn't fruit-flavoured? They don't care and won't talk about it.

Is the feature I need available for this Linux device? No idea, but it does work with watchOS and tvOS made by Apple...

1 comments

> Is the feature I need available for this Linux device?

If it’s in Foundation, yes. Swift 6 on Apple OSes now (since a while ago actually) uses the same open-source foundation as Linux. If it’s a proprietary framework (e.g. TabularData), no. It’s simple.

For the rest, almost all Swift packages developed by Apple are fully compatible with Linux, and the documentation of said packages is usually explicit wrt. platform specifics, AFAIK.

What a mess. A standard library and then apparently on top of that a Core and that's where they put a Foundation, you can imagine Apple architects arguing with the elevator contractors, "No, no, the Ground floor of our building is below our Foundation, it's very straight forward..."

But although that's enough for me to want no part of it, that's not what I was gesturing at. When we dig under the "Foundation" to look at the standard library we find that contrary to your assurance what works and how it works varies from one platform to another, just Apple only care about Apple platforms and so as usual they don't think that's worth mentioning.

They do have this information, they just don't publish it on their Apple pages because they're Apple and yet they insist this counts as the Swift documentation - and that should be all the reason you need not to take such "support" seriously.

At that point I’m gonna need specific examples, because such differences between platforms are getting more and more sparse…

Also I’m not sure what the Core thing you’re talking about even is.