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“Swift will be open source later this year”

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

#171

Post by melling »

omaranto wrote: post #162
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.

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

1000 posts. I let people filter by site.

I put all the raw data on Github as a tsv so anyone can use in Excel, etc.

https://github.com/melling/SwiftResources

Hopefully, I get around to putting a real search engine behind it. I currently don't crawl and index the sites.

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

#172

Post by indians_pro »

chc wrote: post #20
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?

You'd probably get more upvotes if you didn't start out by complaining about hypothetical downvotes.

he is stating what he believes will be true. i didn't read a complaint anywhere. in fact, i think he was implying how sure he was about his folliwing statments, as he was ready to post them inspite of the (expected) downvotes.

expected things are, by their very nature, hypothetical until they come true or are proven false.

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

#175

Post by thebouv »

melling wrote: post #140
honest_joe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What?

Do you realize how far Java reaches into the enterprise?

And with Swift's focus still being around the walled garden of iOS/OSX development, even with the open sourcing there are many more "IFs" to achieve before Swift rivals Java in adoption.

Don't get me wrong. I don't use Java and I have made apps for iOS (though not with Swift yet unfortunately). I like Swift and intend on trying it. But rivaling Java? Certainly no time soon.

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

#176

Post by coldtea »

nickysielicki wrote: post #161
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.

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 fre…

>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.

That's just like your opinion man.

If Swift is Open Source it's gonna be a huge thing, for two reasons: (a) it already attracts millions of developers because it's the suggested language to develop iOS apps in, and (b) it's a nice modern language that plays in a very hot niche (with languages like Go, Scala, Rust etc).

>When I look at swift, the only thought I have is that it is the new iOS language.

OTOH, tons of people and HN and elsewhere expressed their liking for the language and how they wished it was open sourced so they can use it elsewhere too.

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

#177

Post by the_af »

fleitz wrote: post #149
the_af wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of Obj-C was kind of to avoid writing the kinds of apps where a great type system would really shine, swift lets you build those kind of apps, but in my opinion most of the time we shouldn't be building them. Can you clarify this? What is the kind of apps where a "type system would really shine"? How can you avoid writing them?

Apps that have a lot of YAGNI features. eg. For some reason your app has the ability to use Postgres instead of SQLite, even though you always use SQLite. eg. For some reason your app supports Postgres/MYSQL/SQL Server because every enterprise you sell to wants to run their preferred database instead of the one that works best with your product. In short 'enterprise' apps.

I'm not trying to be contrarian, but I fail to see what great type systems (or lack of them) have to do with YAGNI or writing poorly architected enterprise apps.

Are you saying the main application of type systems is writing overengineered enterprise apps? Do you think type systems have no place in well-architected and/or minimalist apps?

Can you elaborate more?

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

#178

Post by shmerl »

pjmlp wrote: post #165
shmerl wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are actually listed as Vulkan participants: https://www.khronos.org/vulkan

No idea what they actually do, but if they'd add Vulkan support to PlayStation, it would be good for developers. Some Apple developers so far participated in SPIR-V / LLVM related discussions. And MS was notably absent in anything related.

As I said, when they'll fix this lock-in mentality, I'll second the claim that they seriously changed for the better.

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

#179

Post by hockeybias »

nickysielicki wrote: post #161
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.

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 fre…

ditto.

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

#180

Post by chimeracoder »

ohitsdom wrote: post #116
X-Istence wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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).

> 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).

I have a feeling that's what Firefox Hello will eventually become (if it gains traction).

As it stands, I can already post a link in this thread and anyone who visits it from any WebRTC-enabled browser (including mobile devices!) can immediately start a video chat with me[0].

That's not federated (yet), but if it catches on I see no reason why it won't be.

[0] If I weren't in the "quiet room" in my coworking space right now I'd try it as an interesting experiment in the HN community. :)

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