101–110 of 573 posts
Aside from graphics/GUI programming; there is little advantage to Objective C or Swift. The "language" may be "open sourced"; but will the important Cocoa implementations be open sourced? It shouldn't be to too tough to re-implement Swift; unless Apples starting suing people for doing it. The exact meaning of Apples announcement needs some clarification.
I will surely be downvoted for speaking so off the cuff, but I haven't really enjoyed swift so far. How has the general developer reception been to the language, not just with respect to obj-c, but also to java or any other turing complete language?
> Swift will be open source later this year, available for iOS, OS X, and Linux. They're doing Linux but not Windows? Is Windows not sufficiently important or maybe they just forgot to include Windows in the announcement?
It's perhaps because Linux is (almost) POSIX compliant, but Windows is not? It would make porting to Linux far more easier than to Windows.
Nice to see that Chris (Lattner) got his way. I chatted with him last WWDC right after the main Swift technical session, and he expressed the desire to open source it, but had no idea if he could get it through the powers that be. Supporting the standard libraries on Linux is certainly a surprise, though.
People who talk about swift compare it to Rust and Go. I can see how the syntax is to ObjC what Go is to C++. Else but that, in what way is Swift anything like Go or Rust? To me (someone who does Lisp & JS, so none of these all) go seems cool for concurrency and being 'boring' (in a great way). Rust seems cool for being very robust and 'safe' (or hard to screw up with), while still doing concurrency nicely and lettin…
> Swift will be open source later this year, available for iOS, OS X, and Linux. They're doing Linux but not Windows? Is Windows not sufficiently important or maybe they just forgot to include Windows in the announcement?
Maybe it is just because WINAPI is different from *nix.
Swift on Rails, who's first :) ? I suspect Heroku are working on preparing for an out of the box build pack, but I guess they don't have access yet since it's out late 2015. At least I hope so, looking for a better Ruby replacement but I still like Rails.
Apple explicitly said they see Swift as a systems language... curious what people thing about that. Does it compete with C/Rust, or is it just a pipe dream/marketing message?
The first question you should ask for any systems language is how to I integrate assembler, when the answer is to use C / C++ then you know it's not a systems language.
Also, how you can tell a language is a systems language, it has an operating system written in it used by a large user base.
How do you layout a struct in Swift so that it's the exact size and layout you want? You can't, again, not a systems language. It's like going to Home Depot and buying "industrial grade" appliances which are usually just your standard shitty appliances with a stainless finish.
Aside from graphics/GUI programming; there is little advantage to Objective C or Swift. The "language" may be "open sourced"; but will the important Cocoa implementations be open sourced? It shouldn't be to too tough to re-implement Swift; unless Apples starting suing people for doing it. The exact meaning of Apples announcement needs some clarification.
The language itself is lovely. What parts of cocoa feel essential to you?
I think Foundation might be necessary though, even if you just use Swift structs (Array, Dictionary, etc)
Nice to see that Chris (Lattner) got his way. I chatted with him last WWDC right after the main Swift technical session, and he expressed the desire to open source it, but had no idea if he could get it through the powers that be. Supporting the standard libraries on Linux is certainly a surprise, though.
Think: How many iOS apps are frontends to a server API? And how many of those APIs are running on Linux servers? Swift on Linux means ~all the code for a client-server iOS app can be written in the same language.