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“Swift will be open source later this year”

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161–170 of 573 posts

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

#161
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.

Too little too late. Apple could have got my attention if they had done this from the start, but at this point I find it hard to get excited about this. Half the reason I find myself drawn to a new language is the culture and community surrounding it. You might think this seems silly at first glance, they're programming languages, not fraternities. But hear me out.

Golang is a pragmatic crowd. Go into #go-nuts on freenode, you'll notice that discussion rarely deviates from solving problems. Many links to the go playground. Go, from the beginning, shaped their community in this way. Consciously? Who knows. But the community turned out the way it did and I believe that's a result of their start.

Haskell is a computer scientist crowd. People write in haskell because they enjoy the functional paradigm and haskell is a purely functional language. Discussion on freenode? Very dense. People are expected to grasp topics easily and the community initially gives everyone the benefit of the doubt that they are capable of understanding it until they ask for more help.

When I look at swift, the only thought I have is that it is the new iOS language. I don't believe they'll be able to deviate from that. I don't see myself making iOS apps, so I don't see myself every writing a single line of the language. When I first looked at swift, my impression was that it was a wierd and somewhat-functional language that had a few unique things. Maybe I would have taken an interest in it. But at this point, I don't want to have to wade through a bunch of iOS specific questions to get what I need. I don't want to have to deal with being a beta tester for their linux implementations. I don't want to use the language when I'm probably going to be using it in a vastly different way than the rest of the community is. My interests are going to be second class.

It's not necessarily set in stone, but I think it is. In a world where there's a new language every day, I just don't see why I'd go with swift.

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

#162
post #46
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Rust fills a slightly different niche with its safety-first principle, but Swift should eventually be a really attractive choice for anyone building cross-platform stuff that also needs to run on iOS.

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.

1000 blogs or blog posts? If you meant blog posts, on roughly how many blogs did they appear?

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

#163
post #107
post #14

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.

They should call it Swift On Sails.

Haha, yeah though Sails is also a Rails like framework for JavaScript

http://sailsjs.org/#!/

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

#164

Ah, interesting. I've suddenly gone from "Not caring at all about the existence of this language" to "Mildly intrigued." It's amazing what some opening of control will do.

I'm hopeful but until I see a license and what is and isn't opened sourced I'm going to be reserved.

One imagines it'll be liberally licensed like LLVM, which Chris Lattner also BDFLs. And they said it would be the compiler and the runtime for OS X, iOS, and (surprisingly) Linux.

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

#165
post #136
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being part of Kronos doesn't mean they are forced to implement any of their standards.

Sony is a good example. The only Khronos stuff they use is WebGL in the PS4 menu and that OpenGL ES 1.0 with Cg shaders for the PS3 that no one used. All studios targeting PS3 favoured LibCGM (http://sandstormgames.ca/blog/tag/libgcm/).

But hope is good I guess.

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

#166
post #64

Did they tell under what license? If they really want to mess things up, they would choose GPL2 without the 'or later' part, but my guess would be BSD, but Apache and Apple's Public Opensource License also are possible ( http://www.opensource.apple.com/apsl/ ).

I'll be surprised if it is anything other than ASPL. ASPL isn't GPL compatible. Any GPL compatible license would be great.

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

#167
post #6

I remember a thread on HN [1] from a few months ago talking about how apple was never going to do this. I'm so glad they were able to pull it off! Good for you, Apple! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8488808

> a few months ago talking about how apple was never going to do this

I would have definitely participated in the hate if I had seen that thread, all I can saw now is: bravo Apple! More of this please!

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

#168
post #120

> 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?

Windows already has F# and compilation to native code via NGEN, MDIL and .NET Native. Swift won't bring much anyway.

I disagree. Swift and its accompanying libraries are designed for automatic reference counting rather than tracing garbage collection. I think that's a big deal for mobile apps (see Drew Crawford's take on GC in mobile apps, http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow...). In that light, Swift projections for WinRT would be great.

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

#169
post #17
post #6

I remember a thread on HN [1] from a few months ago talking about how apple was never going to do this. I'm so glad they were able to pull it off! Good for you, Apple! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8488808

They haven't pulled it off yet. They've just finally stated that they intend to do so , not actually done it yet. Prior to this, they hadn't even said it was on the table. So, progress, but they still haven't pulled it off.

I would argue that the biggest challenge of open-sourcing Swift was getting the go-ahead, not the actual mechanics of doing it. So from that point of view, they have pulled off the hardest part.

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

#170
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.

So here's the thing. They will release Apple Music for Android... and there's full stdlib of Swift support for Linux? Could it be that the Android app is partly Swift?
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