Gathering System Information in Swift With sysctl
The reason why
sysctlfeels so cumbersome in Swift is:
- Creating an array of
Int32and passing that by pointer for the first parameter is a nuisance in Swift- You basically need to call
sysctltwice: once witholdpequal tonilto get the size required for the result buffer and then a second time with a properly allocated buffer.- The result is returned as an untyped buffer of bytes which you then need to interpret correctly.
- There are a few different ways in which failure can occur and we want to reduce these different ways to idiomatic Swift errors or preconditions.
For these reasons, I use a wrapper around
sysctl[…]
1 Comment RSS · Twitter
March 21, 2016 5:55 AM
"The reason why sysctl feels so cumbersome in Swift is:"
Let's sum it up to: calling C APIs from Swift can be worse than using the bridge APIs between Cocoa and CoreFoundation "objects".
One of the reasons why I'm wondering whether Swift has any future as a language to be used for system command line tools (since, AFAIK, the Posix APIs are C-based).
