Swift is Open Source • Hacker News Board

Re: Swift is Open Source

#61

Post by Joky » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 3:55 PM UTC

sdegutis wrote: post #48

They're releasing the source code to libdispatch? I thought that was one of Apple's trade secrets, and more applicable than just Swift apps since it's a C lib?

libdispatch is Open Source for a long time now: http://www.osnews.com/story/22152/Apple_Releases_Grand_Centr...

Re: Swift is Open Source

#62

Post by beagle3 » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 3:55 PM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #34

sinatra wrote: post #17

This is good news (hoping the github link etc will start working in a day or two)! One side effect of swift being open sourced is that more developers will start looking at it for server side development. However, I personally think that Swift will continue to have strong reliance on Apple (esp considering that most external Swift developers will come from iOS development). So, till I see Apple showing interest in Sw…

esp considering that most external Swift developers will come from iOS development I am wondering about this. To me, it seems that there is still space for a modern, pragmatic language that compiles to native code. Coming from C and C++, I have been using Go recently for applications where garbage collection and some performance loss due to a relatively weak compiler is acceptable. However, I still find the lack of p…

Have a look at dlang and nim-Lang. Both answer that

Re: Swift is Open Source

#63

Post by SXX » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 3:56 PM UTC

billybilly1920 wrote: post #43

Can this do GUI programming on Lin/Win? Or Are there usable gui libraries for doing cross platform development like QT?

GNUstep developers stated several times that they'll implement bindings for Swift if it's released as open source. Though from my personal (and very limited) experience I may suggest that you won't use it for cross platform development. It's works on Linux reasonable well, but support for Windows is limited or at least it's was few years ago.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#64

Post by rspeed » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 3:57 PM UTC

sdegutis wrote: post #50

iraphael wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downloads page on swift.org has links though.

Not for the source code to any project.

The downloads page has links to snapshots of the source.

Edit: Though I suppose the tools are only provided as binaries.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#65

Post by athenot » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 3:57 PM UTC

I wonder if Apple is positionning it as a competitor to Google's Go? They are hinting at a usage beyond just iOS and OS X.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#66

Post by DrJokepu » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 3:59 PM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #34

sinatra wrote: post #17

This is good news (hoping the github link etc will start working in a day or two)! One side effect of swift being open sourced is that more developers will start looking at it for server side development. However, I personally think that Swift will continue to have strong reliance on Apple (esp considering that most external Swift developers will come from iOS development). So, till I see Apple showing interest in Sw…

esp considering that most external Swift developers will come from iOS development I am wondering about this. To me, it seems that there is still space for a modern, pragmatic language that compiles to native code. Coming from C and C++, I have been using Go recently for applications where garbage collection and some performance loss due to a relatively weak compiler is acceptable. However, I still find the lack of p…

I have worked extensively with both Swift and Go. The currently available Swift implementation in Xcode is fairly closely tied to Cocoa (and hence OS X); I think this would be a serious barrier to generic server-side usage of Swift, so I'm curious to see if they have done anything about that (and what).

Otherwise, it's a fairly decent language. It doesn't have Go's concurrency baked in to the language, but on OS X you can use Grand Central Dispatch (libdispatch) which is a very decent concurrency library and it works very well with Swift, I'm hoping it will be available in the Linux port of Swift as well.

Besides the more sophisticated type system, a major advantage (or disadvantage, depending on how you look at it) of Swift over Go is it's memory management mechanism: it uses Automatic Reference Counting, which makes garbage collection more deterministic and efficient, at the expense of a certain level of overhead in the developer's thought process (e.g. the developer has to be mindful of things such as reference cycles etc).

Re: Swift is Open Source

#67

Post by mingodad » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 3:59 PM UTC

Testing the binaries on ubuntu decompressed to to $HOME/swift and trying to execute swift:

Welcome to Swift version 2.2-dev (LLVM 46be9ff861, Clang 4deb154edc, Swift 778f82939c). Type :help for assistance.

  1> help

opening import file for module 'SwiftShims': No such file or directory

1>

I could not find any mention to environment variables that could be used to override default locations, like SWIFT_LIBRARY_PATH or something like it.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#68

Post by iheart2code » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 4:00 PM UTC

It's great to see them follow through with this. I remember when Steve Jobs went on stage and said that FaceTime would be an open standard. Haven't seen that happen yet.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#69

Post by microtonal » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 4:00 PM UTC

beagle3 wrote: post #62

microtonal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

esp considering that most external Swift developers will come from iOS development I am wondering about this. To me, it seems that there is still space for a modern, pragmatic language that compiles to native code. Coming from C and C++, I have been using Go recently for applications where garbage collection and some performance loss due to a relatively weak compiler is acceptable. However, I still find the lack of p…

Have a look at dlang and nim-Lang. Both answer that

I experimented with D ~2008-ish. IMO it's definitely superior to Go. The problem is that D is probably not going to gain critical mass anymore (I expect the same for Nim). This has an impact on its future ecosystem.

Since Swift is pushed by Apple, it probably won't suffer from the same ecosystem problems.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#70

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 4:01 PM UTC

Congratulations on the efforts done by whole involved to make it open source.

But I wonder if it will fare better than Objective-C outside Apple eco-systems without the tools and OS libraries...