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Swift is Open Source

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351–360 of 458 posts

Re: Swift is Open Source

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The slides are here:

http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-d...

The direct link to the Oracle part:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2107

Re: Swift is Open Source

#352
post #294

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

Wow, congratulations, that's really cool! Speaking of errors, I remember receiving the "Expression was too complex to be solved in reasonable time" error when I was first implementing Catmull-Rom splines for calculating flight paths in a game that I developed. I translated that to, "The math is making the room spin up in here." Definitely the "coolest" error I've hit working with Swift.

When that happens, try adding type signatures to any closures that are currently using inferred types. It often fixes it.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Swift the language is not to be confused with the iOS framework or tools. While more and more of iOS (and I presume XCode) is written in Swift, that all continues to be closed sourced code and is Mac specific.

:'( still I wait, likely without end

Secretly most of the sales of macs and profits of iOS are from developers.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#354
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 wonder if Apple is positionning it as a competitor to Google's Go?

They're giving themselves the option to get out of the computer hardware business if the car takes off without killing their phone business. Think about it. Right now if they killed off the MBP then most devs would switch to Android and they'd lose their iPhone monopoly. But if Swift gains traction as an open platform, they have the option to stop making hardware and open source or license OS X while still maintaining the dominant position in the smartphone market.

I'm not saying that Apple will definitely get out of hardware. But with Intel's rate of innovation slowing down and the R&D for each generation of chips getting exponentially more expensive, one possible future is that the business is not profitable enough to justify the resource drain.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Honestly, there are some libraries for swift which are shockingly authentic clones of go's channel + routine syntax. Abstractions like that are not swifts problem. Edit: also, look at https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-libdispatch so those libraries should be portable.

Yes, this library is listed on swift.org right now as a work in progress for Linux, so Apple is both aware and going to get it done.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#356
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically they haven't been, and the page about planning for Swift 3.0 says it will introduce breaking changes. (It also mentions that Swift 2.2 will be released in the interim and its compiler will try to warn about things that will be broken in 3.0 so you can get your code ready early.)

It's interesting to compare Swift 2 -> 3 to the Python 2 -> 3 upgrade experience. Apple will simply break whatever they need to break to get the improvements they decide would be valuable, move on, and anyone who doesn't follow is likely to be left in the dust. Frankly, I welcome it after years of feeling like the only Python 3 user on Earth. For the next few years, I expect Apple will wield a great deal more power o…

Swift 3 will be ABI stable, so things will break less - that might not include standard library stability, but Swift projects currently include a copy of the standard library to avoid that.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#357
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically they haven't been, and the page about planning for Swift 3.0 says it will introduce breaking changes. (It also mentions that Swift 2.2 will be released in the interim and its compiler will try to warn about things that will be broken in 3.0 so you can get your code ready early.)

It's interesting to compare Swift 2 -> 3 to the Python 2 -> 3 upgrade experience. Apple will simply break whatever they need to break to get the improvements they decide would be valuable, move on, and anyone who doesn't follow is likely to be left in the dust. Frankly, I welcome it after years of feeling like the only Python 3 user on Earth. For the next few years, I expect Apple will wield a great deal more power o…

It's kinda maddening sometimes, I have an app that every time XCode is updated it pretty much has at least one little change that has to be done to get it to build again. It makes me somewhat dread every update.

But, at the same time, they keep users upgrading at the same relentless pace and so you generally don't need to worry about supporting 10 year old versions of the OS.

Cuts both ways I guess!

Re: Swift is Open Source

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but seems like if anyone has scale problems, google would Google doesn't use Go at such large scale though. Some projects here and there, and most of them small for all I've read. The most publicly celebrated ones being a MySQL front-end for YouTube and a caching-layer (?) for Google Downloads. Not exactly earth shattering applications.

My understanding is that beyond the examples you talk about that go is being used extensively in google as a backend glue language for automation and services. https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article

>as a backend glue language for automation and services.

Which again is not "at scale" (except in the sense that this automation manages thousands of servers etc).

It's what people used to use Tcl, Perl, Python, etc for.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#359
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but seems like if anyone has scale problems, google would Google doesn't use Go at such large scale though. Some projects here and there, and most of them small for all I've read. The most publicly celebrated ones being a MySQL front-end for YouTube and a caching-layer (?) for Google Downloads. Not exactly earth shattering applications.

These apps were the ones causing glacial compile times in c++?

I don't think the ones "causing glacial compile times" have been replaced.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good watch. Don't skip it.

I find his speaking style extremely irritating. I can't take more than a few minutes of this. I'm sure it's full of substance, though. Perhaps there's a transcript somewhere?

I hope Bryan once publishes the annotated presentation? I'm also one of those who have problems following the narration in the video. Until then, I've posted a link to the slides here (see my other post).
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