Taylor – Swift on bare metal
In this technical retrospective (2016), @tambourine_man shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 157 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 69 comments
I think the fun ends when most Swift related stuff are named Taylor...
Some examples are
- the OP's project
- https://tailor.sh/ ↗ - Cross-platform static analyzer and linter for Swift
- https://github.com/izqui/Taylor ↗ - lightweight library for writing HTTP web servers with Swift
- Many many others at https://github.com/search?l=Swift&q=taylor&type=Repositories&utf8=%E2%9C%93 ↗
``` 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".
Please stop!
[1]: https://github.com/izqui/Taylor ↗
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.
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.
"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."