> "all 3rd-party libraries are a potential liability."
Yup. Even if they are responsive today, doesn't mean they will be, tomorrow.
My views on The Dependapocalypse are not usually welcome, in modern discussions of software strategy.
Not exactly sure why they are using string(describing:) in ship code. I suspect the architecture may need a bit of a look-see.
I only use it in debug tracking. It's the reflection API, and that's not really something I'd consider for runtime. Sort of like using exceptions for branching. It works, but your results may not be optimal.
UPDATED TO ADD: I did think of one place I might use it (actually, the ".description" computed property), and that's in a "one-off" bit of code that may be doing something like figuring out how to deal with some JSON I parsed, or reading stored prefs. Otherwise, I've usually figured out other ways to deal with it. One advantage I have, is I seldom use third-party libraries, and can actually go into my modules, and tweak them to serve the frontend better (in fact, I just did exactly that, this morning).
I've fixed similar performance problems, typically the reason people use this is because it's a convenient way to get the name of the type or because they are logging it somewhere and get the default Swift behavior.
I don't think we can conclude from this that there's anything wrong with the third-party library people... there are tradeoffs and doordash probably isn't their only user. Doordash may not be paying or contributing either. Maybe the 3rd-party library people could have sent a basic "Thanks for the feature request" reply for the sake of politeness... But lacking that polish doesn't make them "selfish".
> Maybe the 3rd-party library people could have sent a basic "Thanks for the feature request" reply for the sake of politeness... But lacking that polish doesn't make them "selfish".
Why would they? I mean, when was the last time you got a "thank you" message by opening a feature request to any open source project bug tracker?
But then I'm thinking, what does it matter? Is this the only selfish 3rd-party library out there?
Maybe better than: "Here is a bad library to link against", the takeaway is "all 3rd-party libraries are a potential liability."