[Suggestion] Optionally create a Mac executable instead of a Playground when appropriate. about spi-playgrounds-releases HOT 4 CLOSED

it's nowhere near as bad as you describe

I'm French, so I complain a lot, and loudly! To be honest, I don't know what's happening. I'm often using resources though (for example some CSV I need to parse), so it could be related to this.

I'm aware of Arena and used it in the past, but I assumed it was discontinued/rebranded into SPI-Playgrounds! It perfectly makes sense to perform the changes there. I'll check it out!

Thanks!

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Hi Thomas, thanks for the report!

I've noticed that sometimes playgrounds can be a bit weird indeed. What typically works for me is to close and re-open the playground. That seems to shake things loose.

Creating an entire executable project is one way to work around it but I feel like the main selling point of our playgrounds integration is the fact that you're getting the live results.

I think the best fix for this would be if playgrounds were more reliable. Is there perhaps a reproducible case that we could take to the Xcode team? If you've got a FB number I suspect we could alert some folks to it :)

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Thanks Sven.

I have the same issue with vanilla playgrounds on Mac, since the dawn of times. If automatic run is disabled, there is always a moment where they'll stop evaluating, but it's not always reproducible. I have absolutely no hope in old-style playgrounds getting better, they have the same kind of issue since Swift 1.0. For some reason, iOS playgrounds seem more reliable, and the new .swiftpm targets are quite good too (but they are SwiftPM executables under the hood).

Let say that I want to quickly check some async algorithm using swift-async-algorithm, it will not matter very much to me if I'm running a playground that will print in the console, or a single file Mac executable that will also print in the console. The Mac executable will simply execute faster than playgrounds because it doesn't need to display extended information, and it also works more reliably, be debuggable and have better contextual actions.

I get the selling point around Playgrounds. I was not suggesting to replace them, but to offer an option to generate a macOS executable package instead when possible. It is likely that this approach can be extended to .swiftpm packages and will allow to generate iPad compatible playgrounds.

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That's odd though. While I do see issues around playgrounds occasionally it's nowhere near as bad as you describe! I do use them quite frequently and believe me it works quite well. I wonder what's going on here?

As to adding the feature you suggest: I can see it being useful. I'm not sure if you're aware, SPI Playgrounds is using https://github.com/finestructure/Arena under the hood to generate the playground.

Maybe a good intermediate step would be to add the functionality you seek there and then there'd be at least a command line option to quickly generate an executable?

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