SwiftFoundation

Cross-Platform, Protocol-Oriented Programming base library to complement the Swift Standard Library.

Goals

• Provide a cross-platform interface that mimics Apple's Foundation framework.
• Provide a POSIX-based implementation for maximum portability.
• Rewrite Foundation with Protocol-Oriented Programming principals.
• Long-term Pure Swift replacement for the Cocoa frameworks.

Problems with Apple's Foundation

• Objective-C - Apple's Foundation is an old API designed for Objective-C. While it works great (on Apple's platforms) and has a nice API for Objective-C programming, when imported into Swift, you can see the shortcomings of its 20+ year old API.
• Unimplemented - The open source version of Apple's Foundation is severly lacking implementation. Most methods are marked with NSUnimplemented(). Only a small subset of Foundation based on CoreFoundation is implemented (e.g. NSArray, NSString, NSDictionary). Basic Functionality like JSON, Base64, and even HTTP requests are not implemented.
• Portability - Since Apple's Foundation is backed by CoreFoundation, the only supported platforms are currently Linux, Darwin, and (potentially) Windows. Supporting other platforms (e.g. ARM Linux, BSD, SunOS) would require changes to the CoreFoundation codebase, written in C, which is not good for a long term Swift base library. We want all of our code to be understood by any Swift programmer.
• Protocol Oriented Programming - Perhaps the biggest reason to use this library, is to break free from the old Object-Oriented Programming paradigms. Swift structures and protocols free you from pointers and memory management, along with bugs related to multithreaded environments. Creating structs for basic types like Date and UUID allows you to use let and var correctly. Structs also bring huge performance improvements since the compiler can perform more optimizations and doesn't have to create all the metadata needed for the Swift class runtime.

Targeted Platforms

• LLVM Compiler
  • Darwin (OS X, iOS, WatchOS)
  • Linux

Compiling on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install uuid-dev libjson-c-dev
swift build
.build/debug/UnitTests

Implemented

To see what parts of Foundation are implemented, just look at the unit tests. Completed functionality will be fully unit tested. Note that there is some functionality that is written as a protocol only, that will not be included on this list.

• Base64
• Data
• Date
• FileManager
• JSON
• Null
• Order (equivalent to NSComparisonResult)
• RegularExpression (POSIX, not ICU)
• SortDescriptor
• Thread
• URL
• UUID

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the MIT License.