I'm the author. This wasn't something anyone was supposed to 'find', it's not even really a 'project', just a quick hack to demonstrate a point; I don't even think it's valid to say the project name is "taylor", it's just the name of the repository - I probably should have just called it "swift-on-baremetal" or something equally boring. I have a history of my stupid little 'projects' showing up on HN.
I dont use Swyft, so definitely have no interest in running it bare metal... but the name is brilliant. It made me click on the link. Just had to tell you that!
The code in the repository builds a multiboot-compatible x86 "kernel" that can be booted with GRUB or iPXE or any number of other bootloaders supporting the format.
Maybe we need a rule about submitting other people's projects? Even though I don't mind if people check out/use my public GitHub repos I would not want them submitted on HN by someone else.
If there's a reason to think there's something wildly controversial there, perhaps, but if you've put it in a public repo I really don't think that should be a requirement. Especially given that there are several places where you can repos private for free if you don't want people to give it more attention than you planned.
I should clarify that I'm not insulting the linked projects; I'm pointing out the limited discussion and large number of submissions the submitter gives.
Could someone please explain what this project is about? I gather it's a new implementation of the Swift language without using Xcode's compiler and Swift standard library, but I find the full readme very undescriptive of what this is and why it's useful.
EDIT: Clicking through the source I found about a dozen files in total, mostly scripts and make files.
It builds Swift without any standard library, runtime or linkage to other components. This isn't normally possible with the Swift compiler.
The solution doesn't involve changing the compiler or building everything into the executable. Instead, this is a makefile coordinated pipeline (front-end swiftc, back-end clang) plus a start.s and a system.c file that omit any need for typical standard library components in the first place.
Horrible Taylor Swift puns in Swift development
considered harmful.
It's already been done[1], it makes your project completely un-Googleable, and it also pollutes the search corpus making it harder for automatons to weed out Taylor Swift stories even when searching for things like "Swift compiler intermediate representation".
It's a problem of recognising context. Current technology is not very good at this. What would be nice to have is automatic disambiguation - taking fdej's example, when searching for "Taylor shift", a search engine could ask "Did you mean Taylor Swift, or do you want to shift polynomials?".
Other possible examples: "bat" (flying animals or sports equipment?), "rock" (stones, music, or maybe both? :P), "minute" (60 seconds, report, or something extremely small?). In all of these cases, the software can't tell the meanings apart very well yet. That's a problem with the software.
duckduckgo does exactly that - it lists all the possible interpretations across the top of the results page, plus a list of likely matches (based on statistics I suppose). Try searching for 'polish' which could mean making shoes shiny, or central European people.
So it's like a captcha for index/retrieval, interesting. A purely cultural robots.txt reimplementation that extends the index invisibility cloak even to mentions on third party sites!
"What's in here right now doesn't need any Swift runtime support. That will change very quickly as we try to add support for things like arrays, classes, structs, strings, etc."
The Google personalisation filter bubble seems to have me covered, even in incognito (this is a work machine with its own public IPv4). Nothing but programming on the first five pages for either query.
"std list" is another good one, with very different meanings to C++ programmers and just about anyone else :)
Bad project name for SEO purposes. Do you really want people to trudge through SERPs of some popstar who makes vapid music before they get to your project?
