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Swift is Open Source

swift.org

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Re: Swift is Open Source

#401

Post by dangjc »

iso8859-1 wrote: post #388
dangjc wrote: post #386

Super excited! I will totally be exploring Swift for quantitative work. Julia has been great so far, but a lack of good IDE tooling is making a large codebase difficult to navigate and keep clean. Python has even less type safety than Julia. Swift has a REPL! Go doesn't, and its lack of generics makes writing most algorithms very limited (there isn't even a matrix 32 library, just 64 bit). Java has horrible native in…

You don't need an ecosystem? Swift does not have this, not for Linux at least.

I definitely need a tooling ecosystem, so I'll be waiting for good integration between IDEs and LLVM for Swift. Maybe Atom or VSCode will get there soon. For libraries, when I really need something, I'll wrap it myself using C FFI. It is very easy to pass C structs by value or reference between Julia and C. Go is not bad either and does a lot of static checking for me. Swift sounds like for value types it should be easy. Java is super painful with the marshalling back and forth.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#402

Post by j_s »

sdesol wrote: post #361
thecodemonkey wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really interesting that they decided to retain the full history! It also gives away some information about the initial contributors and the timeframe of when they started.

Here are some visual aids that better shows how this project has evolved. It also shows how active things are today. http://imgur.com/a/HyQWv

Anyone willing to make a Gource video?

https://github.com/acaudwell/Gource/wiki/Videos

Re: Swift is Open Source

#403

Post by Arjuna »

copperx wrote: post #390
Arjuna wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed; that's him! Edwin Catmull [1], along with Raphael Rom [2], created the Catmull-Rom spline. It was perfect for the Galaga-like level in my game. I only need to define a few control points to create a robust flight path for the enemy drones. The cool thing about the Catmull-Rom algorithm is that the spline passes through the control points. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Catmull [2] https://en.wikipedi…

Curious -- were you implementing the drawing algorithm by scratch? or were you using any libraries?

Thanks for asking... I used Apple's SpriteKit framework [1][2]. It's essentially a 2D graphics rendering framework that primarily acts as an abstraction layer for OpenGL ES. In addition, it also offers several other "nice-to-have" features with regard to 2D game development (e.g., collision detection, particles, physics, etc.)

Of course, you could do all of the above without SpriteKit. For example, for all of the rendering, you would simply write everything directly in OpenGL ES.

There are also cross-platform options, like Cocos2d-x [3] and Marmalade [4].

Finally, if you've read this far, you might be interested in reading my general thoughts and feelings from when I finished the game [5].

Cheers!

[1] https://developer.apple.com/spritekit

[2] http://www.raywenderlich.com/category/sprite-kit

[3] http://www.cocos2d-x.org

[4] https://www.madewithmarmalade.com

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8888107

Re: Swift is Open Source

#404

Post by saurik »

SiVal wrote: post #348
glhaynes wrote: post #234

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…

These circumstances are no where near the same: Swift is a compiled language, and they carefully made the decision to embed all of Swift and its runtime libraries in your application, allowing them to break things without disrupting existing applications and without needing backwards compatibility cruft in their operating system. They also have essentially been actively discouraging people from writing libraries in Swift by pointing out constantly that there is not a stable ABI, so you only see a small handful of things written for it in comparison to Python.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#405

Post by aninhumer »

ybx wrote: post #275
rcthompson wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aut…

"does that license apply retroactively to a checkout of the first N-1 commits" No, unless you explicitly state it somewhere (and even then, I'm not certain). If they add a license to the older commits via rewriting history then yes, those older commits will now be licensed. If they don't do so, then copyright will be default i.e. you can't do anything with it. Now, if they had a large history and didn't retroactively…

Is there any legal precedent for this? It seems like one could make a reasonable legal argument for either interpreting a repo as a single distribution or as a bunch of separate ones.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#406

Post by richardfontana »

stormbrew wrote: post #303
darkarmani wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ridiculous: "started cargo-culting the(totally unnecessary) CLA process" It's so they can re-license in the future. There are some projects with so many authors that it is impossible to re-license because you need sign-off by every single person, even if it makes sense to re-license.

From a contributer's point of view, the inability to re-license practically is often a feature, not a bug. CLAs make the worst case scenario touted by GPL advocates about non-GPL licenses practical: They can profit directly and exclusively from your work without your direct consent.

Also the ability to relicense an Apache License 2.0 work is relatively unimportant (compared to, say, the ability to relicense something under a more restrictive license like the GPL).

Re: Swift is Open Source

#407

Post by seabrookmx »

niutech wrote: post #395
SureshG wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For android, we already have kotlin ( https://kotlinlang.org/ ), which is very similar to Swift and has 100% interoperability with java.

Better alternative is Groovy: https://jaxenter.com/groovy-is-the-swift-alternative-for-and...

Better is very subjective.

They both solve a lot of the same problems, but lots of people will go for Kotlin just for static typing.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#408

Post by bliti »

coldtea wrote: post #327
sangnoir wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I fully agree that Go is a poor language if you are building a large, monolithic application. I find that statement hilarious considering that it was explicitly one of the design considerations[1] for Go. So they either failed massively, or there's a difference in perspective on what a good language for programming in the large is. From Rob Pike's talk[1]: > Go was designed to address the problems faced in software…

> I find that statement hilarious considering that it was explicitly one of the design considerations[1] for Go. That doesn't mean much, if anything. One of the design considerations for Java was "write once, run everywhere" and that didn't turn out that well either. Most languages make failed or semi-failed promises. And their idea of addressing software development at scale, might not be 2015's idea of doing the sa…

I share that experience. I use Go whenever the service is simple, requires better performance than Python, and cannot use too much instance resources.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#409

Post by cdcarter »

mei0Iesh wrote: post #312
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

That issue changed my view of GitHub, and related things. I'd seen a few animated gifs in other threads this past week, but it didn't really sink in until this. I used to hold scientists and programmers to a different standard than most normal people, because it seemed like a certain level of advanced understanding was necessary to build anything functional in those fields. But I've since realized that special abilit…

> I used to hold scientists and programmers to a different standard than most normal people, because it seemed like a certain level of advanced understanding was necessary to build anything functional in those fields.

This is a dangerous and wrong idea.

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