“Swift will be open source later this year” • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by hyperpape » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 7:15 PM UTC

X-Istence wrote: post #68

LesZedCB wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but calling it in the keynote is a pretty hard thing to back off from. I don't think they will. Hopefully it'll stay on schedule though!

The same was said about FaceTime... http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/facetime-open-standard-... Sadly, this never came to fruition, supposedly due to legal complications. Since they own Swift, and the underlying compiler infrastructure this may be simpler to pull off.

My understanding is that Steve Jobs made that up on the spot, and of course he could get away with that because he was Steve Jobs (I can't provide a citation, unfortunately--think I heard it from Gruber or the ATP guys on a podcast).

Tim Cook probably wouldn't do something so impulsive based on temperament, and his direct reports would probably not risk it. So I suspect this is a considered announcement.

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

#152

Post by cmyr » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 7:17 PM UTC

lukeh wrote: post #127

mercer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Maybe MS will do it given they're porting ObjC.

MS will almost definitely do it. They've mentioned (maybe off the record) that they were looking into it, and this should seal the deal.

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

#153

Post by jpmcglone » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 7:17 PM UTC

callmeed wrote: post #79

So ... what will they call the Swift MVC framework? Swift on Stilts ?

Hmmm.. Swift on Slabs

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

#154

Post by aaggarwal » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 7:18 PM UTC

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.

I agree, with the type of growth Swift has shown in the past, there is going to be a big demand for Swift developers now. Swift could possibly rule the mobile/web. I have already added it on my #TODO list :)

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

#155

Post by kh_hk » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 7:21 PM UTC

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #8

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

I wonder what this will mean for Qt and QML.

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

#156

Post by jallmann » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 7:21 PM UTC

Sanddancer wrote: post #148

ohitsdom wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FaceTime was my first thought, too. An awesome promise that failed to deliver. It'll be really interesting to see if a video chat format ever becomes a standard, or if we're all forced to keep accounts with multiple vendors for interoperability (skype, hangouts, facetime, etc).

WebRTC is works under Firefox and Chrome, and is standardized.

WebRTC services are still, for the most part, isolated silos. There is no effort made to federate or interoperate between services. For that, you want something like SIP or XMPP/Jingle.

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

#157

Post by Frenchiie » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 7:22 PM UTC

honest_joe wrote: post #91

Any predictions how this can hurt RoR,nodejs and the others ?

Well Node.js(+Framework) is an entirely different beast from Swift(+Framework), RoR, Python+Django, etc. As for Swift(+Framework) vs Python+Django, RoR, etc, Swift would have to be faster and introduce some amazing new feature for it to replace anything. I dont personally like how Swift is statically typed but does type inference. If i dont specify a type for my variable i should be able to change my variable's value to whatever type i want.

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

#158

Post by untog » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 7:24 PM UTC

Tloewald wrote: post #138

untog wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Not with first-class support is isn't.

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

#159

Post by frik » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 7:25 PM UTC

Great, that Apple will open source Swift 2. I hope I can use an Win32/64 community port on Windows 7 next year. Go, Rust, Swift, JavaScript and Julia - a really great time. Thinking back a few years, there were no new mainstream languages for about one decade (ca. 2000-2010).

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

#160

Post by thefreeman » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 7:28 PM UTC

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.

I felt the same way at first in regards to Linux support. But honestly the platforms are similar enough that a Linux fork was probably inevitable once open sourced.

Avoiding this "fracture" could have been a powerful argument for it, along with maintaining control (the nodes iojs situation could not have inspired confidence, though that was not due to interoperability from what I know)