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   Jonathan Wight (schwa@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Apr-2025 00:38:59 JST Jonathan Wight

   Reminder that just because you can it doesn’t mean you should.

   “Config as code” is a bug not a feature.

   Config should be easy to reason with and understand. Being forced to run the code to understand what the configuration is, is a huge failure.

   Package.swift should have been something like TOML (or whatever) with a suitably expressive schema instead…
   https://chaos.social/@ole/114381265023437618

   • Embed this notice
     Jonathan Wight (schwa@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Apr-2025 00:38:58 JST Jonathan Wight

     in reply to

     This is where someone points out `describe --type json`…

     Which *checks notes* converts Package.swift into "something like TOML (or whatever) with a suitably expressive scheme" (in this case JSON but whatever indeed).

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     Jonathan Wight (schwa@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Apr-2025 00:38:58 JST Jonathan Wight

     in reply to

     Dealing with even the most trivial syntax errors in Package.swift is one of the most time consuming and frustrating experiences. Xcode just shits the bed and often gives you little to no information on what failed.

     Even something like an extra comma in your Package.swift would cause inscrutable package resolution errors.

     And they had to rev the _entire_ Swift language to solve that particular problem…

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Apr-2025 00:38:58 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     @schwa
     Agreed. Ruby’s Bundler works so nicely for exactly the same problem space, and I’ve mulled why. It also uses code as config, which agreed is super dicey, but…the code is pretty string-y, and feels much more like config than a SwiftPM manifest does. SwiftPM’s only half-successful attempts to type everything so strongly are one major source of pain.

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     Jonathan Wight (schwa@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Apr-2025 00:38:59 JST Jonathan Wight

     in reply to

     Trivial example of where config as code falls down.

     Ever had to write` platforms: [.macOS("15.0”)]`, instead of `.v15`?

     Congrats, you've just run into a problem directly caused by config as code. The fact that older SPMs can't even compile newer Package.swifts _is_ a problem.

     The fact that you (and you tools) can't validate Package.swift without compiling it is a bigger one of course.

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Apr-2025 03:30:36 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     @schwa Ruby’s look like the one in the screenshot. (A “gem” is the language’s name for a library dependency.) eDSLs are an area of strength for the language — but also note how much of the actual data is just in raw strings.

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     Jonathan Wight (schwa@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 23-Apr-2025 03:30:37 JST Jonathan Wight

     in reply to

     • Paul Cantrell

     @inthehands I can’t speak for ruby. But I look at something like Rust’s cargo.toml with envy. A package config that is easy to read, reason with and edit? Why can’t we swift developers have that.

     Instead we have folks putting for loops into Package.swift. Ugh.