Current state of the swift-system project?

taylorswift · March 20, 2022, 7:31pm

hi all! i was just wondering what the current state of swift-system is. i’m finding a lot of my projects are starting to get bottlenecked by the lack of APIs that have not yet been implemented in SystemPackage. however, the repo doesn’t seem to have had a lot of activity recently. is this package still being developed?

benrimmington · March 20, 2022, 9:04pm

Should this topic be moved to the dedicated subcategory?

Are the missing features listed in the API Roadmap?

My guess is that the string processing and regex proposals are prioritized for now.

rauhul · March 20, 2022, 10:03pm

It is! Due to the package being API & ABI stable on apple platforms, making changes to the package takes a lot of careful work and many of the primary contributors are caught up with other work. (As @benrimmington mentioned, @Michael_Ilseman is working on the regex proposals.)

I have also been meaning to finish up my work on the stat.h wrappers but have been extremely busy with other projects.

taylorswift · March 21, 2022, 3:34am

well, for example, i’ve been needing some directory-related capabilities such as:

creating a directory (like mkdir)
iterating through files in a directory

but i don’t see anything related to that in the API roadmap (unless it’s being referred to by a name i don’t recognize).

this was sparked by the realization that i’m currently expending an extraordinary amount of effort trying to avoid interacting with the file system, simply because the API of SystemPackage is so limited.

when deploying to desktop, i would just use Foundation APIs instead. but i’m deploying to a server environment with very little memory available, where quite literally every megabyte counts. so loading a giant framework like Foundation is a no-go. (i’m linking dynamically because static linking apparently does not agree with SwiftSyntax…)

hassila · March 21, 2022, 5:06am

For 2. You can use:

github.com

hassila/swift-plugin-manager/blob/main/Sources/PluginManager/FilePathDirectoryView.swift

//===----------------------------------------------------------------------===//
//
// This source file is part of the PluginManager open source project
//
// Copyright (c) 2021 Joakim Hassila and the PluginManager project authors
// Licensed under Apache License v2.0
//
// See LICENSE for license information
//
// SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
//
//===----------------------------------------------------------------------===//

import SystemPackage

#if canImport(Darwin)
import Darwin
typealias DirectoryStreamPointer = UnsafeMutablePointer<DIR>?
#elseif canImport(Glibc)
import Glibc

This file has been truncated. show original

If you like…

taylorswift · March 21, 2022, 7:00am

that looks a lot like what i need, thanks!!

mickeyl · March 21, 2022, 8:03am

Not that I want to devalue the great work of the system team, but… perhaps we could move faster if we as a community would collaborate on a common swift posix library. There are quite a few out there, but all incomplete and with different focus.

hassila · March 21, 2022, 10:40am

Super. If it’s not obvious to others it allows for simple iteration thus:

for file in directoryPath.directoryEntries {
…
}

benrimmington · March 21, 2022, 1:43pm

I think those are covered by the future work on FilePath for operations that consult the file system:

FilePath semantic (i.e. file-system interacting) operations

stat, chown, directory iteration, etc.

temporary files

The previous FilePath API review was for "syntactic operations" which don't need any system calls.