121–130 of 573 posts
Microsoft open sourced .NET and I don't see queues of people willing to use .NET just because it's open source.
Some of us have been waiting for a production-ready way to run .NET on Linux and although it is coming it has not arrived yet.
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 as a language is pretty great, however, the tooling and obj-c interop make it a pain in the ass. It's hard to realize most of the performance benefits when everything you're interacting with requires objc_msgsend or uses NSArray / NSDictionary. As well, it's far less 'scripty' than Obj-c. The type system in swift really leaves something to be desired in terms of typing types. The point of Obj-C was kind of to a…
Can you clarify this? What is the kind of apps where a "type system would really shine"? How can you avoid writing them?
No, Apple announces they intend to open source Swift at a future date. That's not the same as doing it.
As far as HN comments go, this one sets a pretty low bar. Is there even one doubt that this will happen? If not, the pedantic distinction between "announce they intend to" and "doing it" is extremely worthless...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_%28programming_language%... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...
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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.
Technically it's the reverse, Windows is POSIX compliant, and Linux is almost compliant. However, the non-posix features liunx provides makes it easy to port from the various *nixes where as Windows precise POSIX compliance ensures virtually nothing runs unless the app is written purely to the POSIX spec.
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Open Source wins! Seriously can't tell you the fights just 8 years ago in conventions with hundreds of librarians where most of them thought Free Software was the devil and hackers all had the key to destroying anything Open Sourced. So can we finally say that Hell has Frozen Over? Microsoft Open Sources Parts of Visual Studio and releases Linux Software. Apple open sourced their language and it will work on Linux.
Open Source did not win. In fact it destroyed a lot of potential markets. With this move Apple is dragging more and more developers that would be interested in Go/ Java (aka Android world) to its net. This is a win for Apple only.
Apple is now going to use USB-C connectors and now Swift is available in Linux?
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Maybe it is just because WINAPI is different from *nix.
That's a good point. It was probably easier to port it to Linux. I can't see why they would intentionally avoid Microsoft (at least not at this point in their history).
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'm unfamiliar with Swift but Objective-C is an excellent language. I much prefer it to C++. Cocoa won't be made Free, no, but perhaps Swift could be used with GnuStep's implementation of the libraries. It's better to not re-invent the wheel.
Hmm they said they wanted Swift used everywhere for the next 20 years, they're going to make it open sourced and provide builds for iOS, Mac and Linux...but not Windows which is one of the largest operating systems in the world? I'm guessing they really don't want it used everywhere. Though knowing Microsoft they'll take Swift and implement support for it in Visual Studio.
https://dev.windows.com/en-us/uwp-bridges/project-islandwood
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9471204
So ironically this announcement might benefit Microsoft a lot.