About updating the swift runtime

[Michele Sciabarra <mi...@sciabarra.com>]

Hello all, with the help of Andrea Scuderi I updated the swift runtime to 5.1. I faced a few difficulties I want to discuss.

Basically there are: the pre-actionloop runtimes, swift 3.1.2 and swift 4.1, and the new ones swift 4.2 and swift 5.1

The 3.2.1 is already no more tested and published but source it is still there.
Also there are some files stored as binaries, that could be removed  using actionloop (but not if you use the old runtimes)

I propose this big cleanup:

- deprecate and remove 3.1.2 and 4.1, leaving 4.2 and 5.1 only
- remove all the old code that still uses the old python based proxy
- remove all the binaries, adding the generation of the zip file in the scala test (I do this in the go runtime so I can do the same for swift)

Also I would like to discuss which libraries to preload in the runtime. There are 2 tests, using SwiftyRequests, that is a library to execute http calls.  The problem is that to compile those libraries it takes 2 minutes.

Actionloop has the ability to precompile those actions (although it is not documented in the readme for swift) so the precompiled binary is very fast to launch. I would like to improve this situation:

- adding some precompiled libraries in the runtime for the more common use cases
- document better the precompilation.


Your thoughts?

-- 
  Michele Sciabarra
  michele@sciabarra.com