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Swift open source – let the revolution begin

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Re: Swift open source – let the revolution begin

#41

Post by stevetrewick »

bsaul wrote: post #38
rsynnott wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technically, either Rust, Python, or Go is superior to Swift in every usecase it has. How so, exactly? The only one on that list I'd say maybe to is Rust.

Swift as a language may not be superior to go in itself ( quite the opposite imho), but the fact that go chose a specific type of concurrent programming and built their language around it makes it more straightforward. With swift, designers chose not to choose. Which means you'll resort to using libraries ( basic threads with gcd or C libraries such as libmill, or libuv), which means future incompatibilities between…

No. GCD is not 'basic threads', GCD is a concurrency model based on executing blocks (closures) on queues. Threads are abstracted away by GCD. NSOperationQueue abstracts even further to provide a higher level concurrency model. Or you can go down the stack to NSThread to actually get your 'basic threads'.

The programmer gets to choose the level of abstraction appropriate to the task in hand.

Re: Swift open source – let the revolution begin

#42

Post by pjmlp »

misiti3780 wrote: post #4

I'm excited about Swift but is there any reason someone who is not making money as an iOS dev but knows objective C well should drop everything in learn it (serious question)? My initial opinion was swift does a lot of things much better, (no header files, new operators, etc.) but learning a new language takes a long time + it appears a majority of code is still in objC

Let me put it this way.

At WWDC 2015, the only talks that used Objective-C were related to the new language features. I don't remember any other still using the language.

So you can already see in which direction Apple bis steering the boat.

Re: Swift open source – let the revolution begin

#44

Post by dvcrn »

TheDrizzle43 wrote: post #10
edgyswingset wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This brings up an interesting problem to solve: How to tell if something is a "real" contributor rather than someone who sends the occasional spelling fix. I imagine recruiters would be interested in some way to easily tell this.

All they have to do is ask them in the phone screen "So what did you contribute to Swift?"

"I analysed the swift codebase for character sequence problems and actively contributed in reducing these. My contributions were responsible for eliminating hundreds of possible issue reports to the project."

Re: Swift open source – let the revolution begin

#46

Post by tomguthrie »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #37
andreasley wrote: post #2

Excellent summary. I'm really happy that Apple open-sourced Swift in this way. However, most of the ~400 pull requests are fixes for single typos. I hope that managing the GitHub issues won't become too much of a burden for the main developers (those with write access to the repository).

That's the low-hanging fruit; actually contributing to the language requires an 'in' with the development team, possibly knowledge of C++, and of course knowledge of building programming languages. Although I've seen that a lot of the basic Swift types are written in Swift, so that would be an area to improve too - that is, if anyone can spot one. Is there a task list for the project? I don't see an 'issues' page.

Issues are at https://bugs.swift.org

Re: Swift open source – let the revolution begin

#47

Post by zimbatm »

panic wrote: post #15
mikeash wrote: post #14

The open source release has been pretty amazing so far, and I believe it's without precedent in Apple's history (with the possible exception of ResearchKit). I was afraid they would just toss a snapshot over the wall and leave the community to struggle with maintaining it (if anyone cared to). At best, I thought we might get some regular snapshots and discussion. Instead, everything is out in the open, the team at Ap…

There is some precedent at Apple: WebKit is also developed in the open.

WebKit was open from the start because they forked KHTML which was licensed under the LGPL.

Re: Swift open source – let the revolution begin

#49

Post by feelix »

edgyswingset wrote: post #9
elwell wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's looks good on your GitHub profile to be a 'contributor' to Swift.

This brings up an interesting problem to solve: How to tell if something is a "real" contributor rather than someone who sends the occasional spelling fix. I imagine recruiters would be interested in some way to easily tell this.

One solution would be to implement upvotes/downvotes on github pull requests.
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