Ask HN: Are there any Swift compilers for JVM?

#1

Post by zerolinesofcode » Sun, Aug 24, 2014, 4:23 PM UTC

Swift- the new programming language from Apple shares a lot with Groovy, a JVM language.

Are there any ongoing work to use Swift to write code that run in a JVM?

Re: Ask HN: Are there any Swift compilers for JVM?

#2

Post by dozzie » Sun, Aug 24, 2014, 5:57 PM UTC

Why? What's Swift good for when stripped of Cocoa? (The same applies to Objective-C, except that it has GNUstep.) There are plenty of languages on top of JVM. Why Swift should be considered better from any of them?

Re: Ask HN: Are there any Swift compilers for JVM?

#3

Post by chc » Sun, Aug 24, 2014, 10:32 PM UTC

dozzie wrote: post #2

Why? What's Swift good for when stripped of Cocoa? (The same applies to Objective-C, except that it has GNUstep.) There are plenty of languages on top of JVM. Why Swift should be considered better from any of them?

Cross-platform code would be the obvious answer.

Re: Ask HN: Are there any Swift compilers for JVM?

#4

Post by argonaut » Mon, Aug 25, 2014, 1:45 AM UTC

As a side note, if you want cross-platform (Android/iOS) code, your options include C/Objective-C/C++ (directly compiled for iOS, and used in Android via JNI) and JavaScript (either a native JS engine or a webview).

Re: Ask HN: Are there any Swift compilers for JVM?

#5

Post by vorg » Mon, Aug 25, 2014, 3:45 AM UTC

> Swift- the new programming language from Apple shares a lot with Groovy, a JVM language

I dispute this claim. According to the top comment at "Swift is a lot like Scala" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8218578 which was submitted an hour before yours here: "Scala, modern C#, Kotlin, Xtend, Nemerle, Ceylon, Dart and Swift have a lot in common. They're all compiled languages with pretty high performance characteristics."

Most of those are JVM languages (Scala, Kotlin, Xtend, Nemerle, Ceylon) which Swift shares a lot with, but Groovy less so I'd say.