Swift is Open Source • Hacker News Board

Re: Swift is Open Source

#251

Post by practicalswift » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 6:55 PM UTC

Happy to see that my collection of Swift compiler crashes (see https://github.com/practicalswift/swift-compiler-crashes) has been part of the official Swift repo since September 2014: https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/e5ca8be1a090335d401cd1... :-)

A previous HN thread about the swift-compiler-crashes project: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9020206

Re: Swift is Open Source

#252

Post by alia20 » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 6:57 PM UTC

999999999999999 wl

Re: Swift is Open Source

#253

Post by kenbellows » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 6:59 PM UTC

So does this mean we might finally get officially supported iOS development on Windows and/or Linux soon?

Re: Swift is Open Source

#254

Post by Twisell » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

kels wrote: post #205

Twisell wrote: post #140

I see this as an hilarious welcome joke from the community : https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/17 Its developer's way to say FIRST

I don't get it, can you explain? I don't know much about licensing...

Well i'm by far not an expert. But a lot of people consider that GPL is an open but maybe too restrictive licence.

Notably, "derived works" using GPL copylefted code must be redistributed under same licence. So basicaly if you consider that Swift is a key component of OSX... This is just not something Apple can accept right now.

Beside I'm not even sure a Licence switch from Apache2 is possible without consent of all contributors. And most definitively a Licence switch can in no way be decided via a Pull Request :P

Feel free to correct me if I missed a point ;)

Re: Swift is Open Source

#255

Post by kristofferR » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 7:00 PM UTC

hokkos wrote: post #142

What kind of trolling is that ? >I think we should use GPL v3 instead. https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/17

Github is weird.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#256

Post by crudbug » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 7:03 PM UTC

throwaway999888 wrote: post #193

crudbug wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking more about Types here var name : String func nameMe(name: String) : String

I was half-thinking the same, but types and sets feel interchangeable on an intuitive level in such cases. Having both `: String` and `: String` seems to suggest that they are the same type, which they are not. `nameMe(_)` is a function type, while `name` is a "plain value", so to speak. I think that using arrows more clearly indicates that it's a mapping from something to something else -- in the case of Swift, I gu…

Point well received.

BTW

Fat arrow looks more appealing than simple arrow.

All the other pieces look very well designed.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#257

Post by chaz72 » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 7:03 PM UTC

iamsohungry wrote: post #231

chaz72 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguing about "the point" misses the point. There's plenty of room for both free software and open source software.

There's room for plenty of things that I don't care about. I don't care about open source software that is still controlled by Apple.

Fair enough. For my part, I would need to see a wider community supporting the language before I depended on it on non-Apple systems. I'll have to wait and see on that point. But that is a plausible outcome - and (in my opinion) more likely because they chose an open source license rather than a free software license.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#258

Post by Shebanator » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 7:05 PM UTC

justplay wrote: post #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/stat…

Highly qualified people get rejected by google's interview process all the time, so people shouldn't take it personally if they get rejected. google is willing to miss out on good people occasionally because they believe they can't fix the problem w/o mistakenly hiring more mediocre/bad people.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#259

Post by mayoff » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 7:06 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #195

Interesting that they rewrote the Foundation library in Swift for the open-source release rather than open-sourcing the ObjC one and bringing along the ObjC runtime. I wonder if this means they still believe the ObjC runtime and Foundation library are still worth keeping proprietary, or just that this is a step toward phasing out ObjC.

They didn't rewrite most of Foundation in Swift, at least not yet. If you look in the files, they are full of calls to NSUnimplemented().

Re: Swift is Open Source

#260

Post by rcthompson » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 7:07 PM UTC

Uzomidy wrote: post #146

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look carefully at that copyright date: 2014-2015. They've rewritten history.

It looks like they used an automated tool to add copyright notices to files in the repository. Probably were required to do that by legal. So it's not 100% faithful history, but close.

This raises some interesting legal questions. If I start a git repo and only add a license in the Nth commit, does that license apply retroactively to a checkout of the first N-1 commits? What if I start out with one license but I change it in the Nth commit? If someone clones the git repo with the Nth commit in it and then checks out an earlier commit, which license applies?

(For simplicity, assume I am the only author of the repo, so I can always change the license arbitrarily whenever I want to.)