Motivation

Apple has finally implemented Pure Swift value types for Foundation in Swift 3.0, but there are some issues with this:

• Only a subset of types like Date are truly value type structs, the rest are structs, but backed by a reference type.
• JSON is still AnyObject, not an enum
• OSS Foundation is huge, will still have the CoreFoundation codebase, and it will still keep the NS* classes. This is not desirable for a Pure Swift portable library.
• With Xcode, SwiftFoundation is a PITA to use because the types conflict with the new Foundation value types, which are imported implicitly.
• They have only implemented this as a Swift addition in Darwin, the Linux support is still lacking, hence making this project still necessary.
• This project provides a lot of functionality that OSS Foundation does not provide.
• The compiled binary for this project is tiny compared to OSS Foundation.
• OSS Foundation still depends on non-posix C libraries like CoreFoundation
• Not as portable as SwiftFoundation because it's not truly Pure Swift.

Solution

• Make conflicting types only compile on Linux. On Darwin we will remove the implementation of conflicting types, and make any additions extensions (e.g. RawRepresentable for UUID).
• Update APIs to have to mirror the Darwin APIs
• Keep all additions (e.g. HTTP.StatusCode, Null, JSON.Value) for both platforms.
• Remove FoundationConvertible since ReferenceConvertible exists.