Jesse Squires is an Apple platform developer who writes about Swift, SwiftUI, Apple policy, and the open web.
HN links it for Swift performance comparisons and Apple commentary; commenters cite his post on Apple's dealings with authoritarian governments and his search engine delisting.
And yet Apple is cooperating with authoritarian governments[1].
For example, in Myanmar[2]:
> Most recently, there was a dispute with ProtonVPN (the company that also makes ProtonMail) over an update for its app in the App Store. Proton Technologies claimed that Apple was intentionally blocking the update amid the ongoing crackdown in Myanmar.
And in China[2]:
> "China appears to have received help on Saturday from an unlikely source in its fight against tools that help users evade its Great Firewall of internet censorship: Apple."
> "The Republic of China flag emoji has disappeared from Apple iPhone’s keyboard for Hong Kong and Macau users. The change happened for users who updated their phones to the latest operating system."
> September 2019 — Apple adopts a “SIM canary”. If you insert a Chinese carrier SIM, apps like TikTok & Apple News no longer function.
> May 2021 — Censorship, Surveillance and Profits: A Hard Bargain for Apple in China
And in Russia[2]:
> October 2020 — Apple forced Telegram to close channels run by Belarus protestors
And in Pakistan[2]:
> February 2021 — Apple Removes Apps for Pakistani Government
There are about a dozen more examples than those in this article here[2]. Here's its conclusion:
> So what does any of this have to do with app developers? Why should we care? When it comes to the iOS App Store, Apple controls where we are allowed to distribute our apps. More importantly, Apple has the unilateral power remove our apps from any…
Your cases 2 and 3 are pattern matches. It's perfectly fine to use regular equality with optionals (case 2) or enums (case 3), but in that case you're not matching a pattern you're comparing two specific values, and you need the types to be equatable[0] (enums aren't by default, though optionals are if they contain an equatable value).
* you can write "foobar == .someEnum" if you've defined "==" for your enum type (in Rust that's a deriving(Eq) away, sadly Swift doesn't seem to have deriving):
// requires conforming to Equatable, and implementing
// requires func ==(a: Foo, b: Foo) -> Bool somewhere
// if the enum has associated data[1]
let v = Foo.Bar;
if v == .Bar {
print("ok")
}
you can also do that with optionals by default:
let w = Optional.some(3)
if w == .some(4) {
print("ok")
}
* `let a = b && thing` doesn't make sense because `let a = b` is not a boolean value it's a pattern match. That's why you have a separate guard (the where) and have to write `let a = b where thing`, this is what happens in pretty much every language with pattern-matching (though syntax may vary)
* `let d == f` makes no sense whatsoever, though as previously noted `f == .some(d)` works
* you can compose `if case` and `if let` in, since both are pattern matches, `if case .Bar = v, let b = w` works fine
If you're getting lost with that, use the regular `if` for boolean stuff, and a full `switch` for all patterns. There, I fixed it.
That…
To help clarify the current situation:
One of those websites reported having problems for a month or so, then having it sorted out all by itself. The author's article on that:
https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2022/07/25/my-website-disappeared-from-bing-and-duckduckgo-part-2/
My sites are technically present, but shown only when I search for the exact domain (bikegremlin.com) or the site name (BikeGremlin).
But none of my articles are shown in SERP when I search queries that otherwise get my articles to top-3 on Google.
I've tried submitting URLs for indexing, to see if that will help, now that at least some problems seem to have been fixed. We'll know in a few days... weeks... months if that's helped. :)
So far, articles in my native are back, at least to a degree.
But none of my articles in English, even those that used to rank highly (both on Google and Bing/DuckDuckGo etc).
I've used this situation to check which search engines rely on Bing for their results (primitive, unscientific method, but I think it's accurate):
https://io.bikegremlin.com/28530/microsoft-bing-serp-gone-overnight/#4
The elephant in the room: DDG's search results are primarily sourced from Bing.
Unfortunately, as long as DDG depends on third-party crawlers, the suggestions to improve search results (& "the algorithm") seem far-fetched & naive.
(DDG does have its own crawler, DuckDuckBot, but apparently it's only used for very specific functionality.)
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/
> For DuckDuckGo, it may be tricky to resolve the issue permanently as long as it relies on Bing.
https://torrentfreak.com/duckduckgo-restores-pirate-sites-and-points-to-bing-220419/
> According to various online forums, the best way to ensure your site gets indexed by DuckDuckGo is to submit it to Bing and Yandex.
https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2022/03/25/my-website-disappeared-from-bing-and-duckduckgo/
Here is the apparent origin post of this undocumented preference:
Hidden preference to alter the menubar spacing https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/16lpfg5/hidden_preference_to_alter_the_menubar_spacing/
The author describes tracing Bartender's activity to hunt down the method.
And this blog post mentions higher values than 6 (recommending 12 for NSStatusItemSpacing and 8 for NSStatusItemSelectionPadding):
How to fix Mac menu bar icons hidden by the MacBook notch https://www.jessesquires.com/blog/2023/12/16/macbook-notch-and-menu-bar-fixes/
The last benchmarks[1] I saw for Swift showed it's generally pretty slow without optimisations on, but various differences in the language from Objective C mean the compiler can optimise it much more, so generally it's faster than Objective C (and actually comparable to pure C at times[2]).
[1] http://www.jessesquires.com/apples-to-apples-part-two
[2] http://www.jessesquires.com/apples-to-apples-part-three/