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“Swift will be open source later this year”

apple.com

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Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#131

Post by pjmlp »

shmerl wrote: post #94
pjmlp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They support Unreal and Unity. Much better than supporting an API that requires 600 LOC for drawing a triangle and isn't available anywhere besides the reference platforms.

Supporting particular engines does not equal supporting open standards. It's not any better than zero rated services with ISPs. I.e. why should Apple or MS be gatekeepers for what engine should work and which shouldn't? Apple at least is interested in Vulkan to some degree (they participate in Khronos). Whether it will show up on iOS is another question. But MS didn't show any interest. So claims that they changed th…

So they just replaced OpenGL accelerated graphics stack by Metal and are still stuck on OpenGL 4.1 with lousy drivers.

Does this sound like a company that will embrace Vulkan, or a company joining the likes of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo?

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#132

Post by kodablah »

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #8

This places Swift right along Golang and Rust as the new interesting language.

I toyed with implementing Swift on the JVM (which is very doable by the way). The problem I've found with Swift is the minute size of the standard library. This has forced a large amount of Swift libraries to make calls to Objective-C/Cocoa classes libraries which makes it very non-portable. I haven't checked any time recently, but if a large, stable, swift-specific stdlib were to emerge then I believe it could definitely rival those other languages. Until then, most libraries will probably be Apple/OSX specific (not to mention Windows concerns).

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#133

Post by lukeh »

sjackso wrote: post #110
cpr wrote: post #11

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.

Supporting Linux is a surprise, but I think it's a great move on their part. 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.

Be interesting to see if they support @objc on Linux, the Apple runtime is difficult to support because it requires the dynamic linker to notify libobjc when an image is loaded.

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#134

Post by AlwaysBCoding »

dmritard96 wrote: post #15

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?

I think it's terrible. Parsing a JSON response into a Swift object takes a full-day to figure out when it's literally just JSON.parse(response) in any other language. You can't pass immutable structures (structs) into NSNotifications and I can't figure out why. It's confusing and poorly documented, and a complete chore to use.

React Native is a godsend.

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#135

Post by steveklabnik »

Animats wrote: post #123
coldtea wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Apple's Dylan language is now open source.[1] It's abandonware, but it's open source. (Jobs: "It's dead. We killed it.") The obsolete Macintosh Programmer's Workbench is also open source now. When Apple open sources something, it's usually because they're abandoning it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_%28programming_language%... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer%27s_Works...

Dylan may be abandonware from Apple, but OpenDylan is still actively worked on. BruceM gives weekly status updates over at Lobsters.

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#136

Post by shmerl »

pjmlp wrote: post #131
shmerl wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supporting particular engines does not equal supporting open standards. It's not any better than zero rated services with ISPs. I.e. why should Apple or MS be gatekeepers for what engine should work and which shouldn't? Apple at least is interested in Vulkan to some degree (they participate in Khronos). Whether it will show up on iOS is another question. But MS didn't show any interest. So claims that they changed th…

So they just replaced OpenGL accelerated graphics stack by Metal and are still stuck on OpenGL 4.1 with lousy drivers. Does this sound like a company that will embrace Vulkan, or a company joining the likes of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo?

They started working on Metal before they knew AMD will give Mantle to Khronos to make Vulkan. So the open question is, whether Apple will support Vulkan or will sabotage it in order to preserve lock-in.

Unlike MS, Apple participates in Khronos Vulkan group if I'm not mistaken. Even Sony does. No idea about Nintendo.

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#138

Post by Tloewald »

untog wrote: post #102
dmritard96 wrote: post #15

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?

It's better than Objective C, so I like it. But if iOS was open to every language I doubt people would be paying much attention to it.

Yeah it's only possible to write iOS apps with C, C++, C#, Ruby, Javascript, Python, LUA...

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#139

Post by DAddYE »

cpr wrote: post #11

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.

Chris is indeed an amazing and humble guy. I had the same opportunity to chat with him (by email) about this topic and he was so kind to answer all my questions (where he could).

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#140

Post by melling »

honest_joe wrote: post #62
melling wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift has a huge advantage in that it's got a bigger community. It doesn't matter which language is the best. On StackOverFlow, for example, Swift has many more questions asked and answered. I've catalogued over 1000 blogs in the first year alone. http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html All this makes it much easier to learn Swift in a short period of time.

That's so obvious. Swift gives you an ability to create something that can generate you $$$ very quickly. Rust on the other hand...

The ecosystem is far more important than the language. Swift has a chance to rival Java in adoption.
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