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Chris Lattner on Swift

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Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#171
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did he mention anywhere Swift will be open sourced, the way LLVM has been? If not, why?

Does it really matter if a language is open source or not? Surely the most important thing is a versioned language specification?

Yes, it does matter. I have little to no interest in Swift if it's walled off into the Apple infrastructure.

I would be very interested if it was opened up and available for Linux.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#172
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has Grand Central Dispatch. It seems that Swift plays well with it, and I won't be surprised if more concurrency-model-as-library stuffs pop up in the future. It's a sound approach and avoids tying the language itself to any singular model.

If you see my comment above [1] I've got an example of just how nicely GCD/libdispatch works with Swift. It's quite exciting really. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7844219

Thanks for the link. When I mentioned "better block/closure support will certainly help" this is what I was referring to, but its nice to see an example. But some in-language support could have made things a lot nicer still, and I find it odd that as a "modern" language that they omitted it.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#173
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did he mention anywhere Swift will be open sourced, the way LLVM has been? If not, why?

Does it really matter ? While I think Swift is an amazing language, it would be much less useful outside the closed ecosystem of Apple. The same thing happened to C#, it never really took off outside Windows.

C# is extremely popular in the gaming industry.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#174
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did he mention anywhere Swift will be open sourced, the way LLVM has been? If not, why?

Does it really matter ? While I think Swift is an amazing language, it would be much less useful outside the closed ecosystem of Apple. The same thing happened to C#, it never really took off outside Windows.

The reason why C# (edited out C3) didn't take off on Linux was:

1) It did take off like wildfire on Linux as Mono

2) People claimed Mono was a trap and not to use it. Because you can never trust Micro$oft

3) personally sad this happened to an open standard language

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#175
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it very likely Apple have all kinds of 1, 2, 5 and 10 year road maps for all their products (software and hardware). Given that almost all of them rely so heavily on Objective-C, I expect they've had a road map for that (and XCode and the whole tool chain) for a very long time. Given the plan is now to phase out ObjC and replace it entirely with Swift, I think it's extremely unlikely Steve didn't know about i…

He did say that it wasn't A major Apple focus until last year, when they actually got together and did all the end work.

It might not have been a major focus until last year, but I'll bet it was on road maps for many, many years preceding that.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#176
Swift "greatly benefited from the experiences hard-won by many other languages in the field, drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list." I have been wondering if in fact this language will be Open Source, since it is said to have taken from other programming languages, some of which are Open Source, yet the decision to make it Open Source has not been made? Lock down.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#177
post #74
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only really innovative parts of Go are its concurrency support, which Swift seems to be completely lacking. Worth noting that one of the greatest problems in software development is concurrency support and its ease of use/robustness. It is a critical and growing issue. In contrast, having or not having generics, optionals (in C# these are nullable types), algebraic data types (which in Go is interface, albiet min…

Genuine question: what does Go provide in terms of concurrency that Swift + GCD doesn't?

Go provides straight-ahead, blocking-is-OK concurrency. GCD provides callback-based concurrency, like node.js, but with several worker threads instead of just one.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#178
post #176

Swift "greatly benefited from the experiences hard-won by many other languages in the field, drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list." I have been wondering if in fact this language will be Open Source, since it is said to have taken from other programming languages, some of which are Open Source, yet the decision to make it Open Source has not been made?…

In general, a _language_ is not open source; its _implementation_ is.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#179
post #53
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people keep comparing Swift and Go, as they have diametrically opposed philosophies. As stated succinctly by Bryan O'Sullivan (one of the most prominent people in the Haskell community) on Twitter: "It's interesting to compare Swift and Go. One has caught up to the 1990s in language design, with the other firmly in the 60s." Swift includes many of the language features that have been touted by…

The only really innovative parts of Go are its concurrency support, which Swift seems to be completely lacking. Worth noting that one of the greatest problems in software development is concurrency support and its ease of use/robustness. It is a critical and growing issue. In contrast, having or not having generics, optionals (in C# these are nullable types), algebraic data types (which in Go is interface, albiet min…

Apple already has GCD/libdispatch, and is presumably content to continue handling this with libraries, at least for now. Concurrency's certainly important, but I don't think it's entirely clear yet that _language level support_ for it is.

Re: Chris Lattner on Swift

#180
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that makes me sad is that because of their focus on secrecy, they're doomed to relearn all that we learned along the way. Having played with the swift playground stuff, just an hour long conversation could've made a big difference. Such is the way of Apple though.

> because of their focus on secrecy, they're doomed to relearn all that we learned That's wrong, condescending and misses the point. Wrong because the developers were not cut off from learning what was learned by others. Condescending in the way it implies that there's a royal "we" of people that should be consulted whenever any programming language is conceived. And it misses the point because some types of learning…

You have some valid points, but they explicitly said lighttable was an inspiration, so Chris' stance should not be confused with hubris.
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