Live data from Hacker News

Swift is Open Source

swift.org

161–170 of 458 posts

Re: Swift is Open Source

#161
post #95
post #65

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.

I'm much more thrilled about Swift the about Go. Sure Go has a head start in server-side department, but from what I know of Swift I'd much rather write webapps in it then in Go. Many webapps have a kind of "highlevelness" to them, and Swift nicely addresses that with it's features. Go is somehow on a kind of feature diet that's just not my cup of tea. And in terms of low-high-level-ness it I put it somewhere in betw…

Swift gives you nice syntax and Go provides you good abstraction for concurrency(channel and goroutines).

Re: Swift is Open Source

#162
post #37

It looks like Apple is also releasing an official package manager for swift.[1] I wonder how that will effect Cocoapods. [1] https://swift.org/package-manager

Also of note, the largest contributor to the package manager is Max Howell (mxcl), the creator of Homebrew: https://github.com/apple/swift-package-manager/graphs/contri...

It looks like he managed to go through a whiteboard coding exercise in the end! As far as I know, Apple follows roughly the same hiring practices as Google. Well done (no sarcasm here, it's probably great to work at Apple)!

Re: Swift is Open Source

#163
post #88

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.

> I remember when Steve Jobs went on stage and said that FaceTime would be an open standard. Haven't seen that happen yet. FaceTime has been the subject of multiple patent lawsuits, which is what has prevented it from being opened. See: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114 and http://www.techzone360.com/topics/techzone/articles/2014/09/...

Why would this affect opening the protocol? Patents aren't about keeping implementations secret.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#164
post #37

It looks like Apple is also releasing an official package manager for swift.[1] I wonder how that will effect Cocoapods. [1] https://swift.org/package-manager

Also of note, the largest contributor to the package manager is Max Howell (mxcl), the creator of Homebrew: https://github.com/apple/swift-package-manager/graphs/contri...

The same guy who wasn't offered a job at Google because he didn't do well in the interview (or was it code in the interview?)

Re: Swift is Open Source

#165
post #120

Am I the only one who finds it odd that while pushing two high level but performant languages (Objective-C and Swift) Apple wrote their Swift compiler in C++?

Why would Apple write a Swift compiler in Objective-C, a language that it is in the process of phasing out in favor if Swift? And of course it is not possible to write a Swift compiler in Swift before the language exists. So no, not odd at all. Quite logical actually.

> of course it is not possible to write a Swift compiler in Swift before the language exists

No, but you can do a self-hosting port after you have a first rudimentary compiler. Many compilers have been built like this. Some did it early in language development with a purpouse built one-off bootstrapping compiler, some did it after the language was somewhat stable (eg Go).

ObWP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_%28compilers%29

Re: Swift is Open Source

#167
I still remember max howel tweet[1] in which he publicly said that we was rejected by Google. Looking at his linkedin profile[2] , he was later hired by Apple in August 2015. Now he is biggest[3] contributed to Swift package manager. It is good to see that the person who has lot of experience in handing Apple and package system is handing this stuff. I guess, things happens for good.

[1] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxhowell

[3] https://github.com/apple/swift-package-manager/graphs/contri...

Re: Swift is Open Source

#168

What was the design decision that required function declaration to be : func hello(name: String) -> String { } rather than, func hello(name: String) : String { }

It seems pretty consistent with functions in a set-notation sense, with functions that map a tuple of stuff to something else. The mapping being indicated by an arrow instead of a colon.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#169
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody knows what effects of the "copyright owned by the contributor" are in the context of Swift's Apache license? I guess the "good side" is that the lawyers of other companies probably like when the code made by their programmers keeps being copyrighted by the company. But it is still an Apache license, so they can't demand too much from the users of the code. Still, are there any negative aspects? Any imaginable…

Aside from the hilarious description of Oracle [t=2107], it's worth watching "The Rise and Development of illumos" [1] as it discusses some consequences of signing away copyright on your contributions to an open source project. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

Can you or someone summarize the salient points, for someone who doesn't have time to watch an hour-long video?

Re: Swift is Open Source

#170
post #86

Such good news. I've bet my career on Scala, but Swift is sufficiently similar in style that it will be an easy transition. A language to write native (not VM-based) apps for the desktop, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, CarPlay and Apple TV is becoming very compelling indeed.

Why be your career on just one language? Shouldn't be such an issue to pick up new skills otherwise you become obsolete.
Post reply on HN