I wonder where the official open source repo will be hosted?
On Github, surely, where they are already hosting ResearchKit.
“Swift will be open source later this year”
201–210 of 573 posts
Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is still not "pulling it off", which is my point.
I think the "pulling it off" here is coercing their megacorp organization into tolerating the idea of open-sourcing something they poured so much time and money into developing. This is also why people have been celebrating Microsoft open sourcing things recently.
"By the end of the year" perhaps suggests that Microsoft got out in front and Apple's hand has been forced into changing their roadmap. I suspect that Apple will struggle with to support cross platform development beyond tossing Swift over the transom. Supporting diverse execution environments is not their core competence historically.
Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The Objective-C support on Linux is already great, the compiler handles it well. The problem is the Foundation library isn't ported so you're left using old, unsupported relics from the OpenSTEP project.
Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”
#204Seeing as Objective-C has never took off on non Apple platforms (and is not any useful without Cocoa APIs) why would Swift be an exception?
Keynote said it will run on Linux in late 2015.
He's not disputing that. Objective C has been able to run on Linux for years. Essentially, nobody actually uses Objective C on Linux even though they technically could. The same will probably be true for Swift.
Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”
#205> 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?
My guess is they're using Linux in their datacenters and want to be able to write programs for them in Swift. That, or they figured that's where all the "Open Source" action is going to be/an "Open Source" language without Linux support is useless.
Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”
#206I wonder where the official open source repo will be hosted?
This is a pretty interesting question: Microsoft has CodePlex, but has also been using GitHub quite a bit lately. Will Apple put Swift as part of http://www.opensource.apple.com/ , or start using GitHub? https://github.com/apple seems to be squatted...
How can you tell that's a squatter and not Apple?
Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”
#207> 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?
They don't just forget stuff like that. It was probably way easier to do on Linux/Unix than Windows.
POSIX to POSIX is way easier to get production ready than porting to the Windows API.
Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”
#208I 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
Or Apple saw that and decide to change its mind.
Sometimes companies change their minds this way, like how Microsoft changed its mind on the banning of DVDs for Xbox, even though they never "officially" said they would do that before the announcement of the Xbox One, but it was strongly "rumored" they would do that. I'm sure that's what they intended, but the outrage was too big to let it be.
Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”
#209Did 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.
I'm fairly certain it will have the same license as LLVM given Swift's creator.
Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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? Cert…
Yes, I've done Java in the enterprise. It's a 20 year old language and there's an estimated 9 million Java developers.
Swift is only one1 but with open source and cross-platform ability (Microsoft will port to Windows), I think we have several million Swift developers with 5 years.
[Update] 30 -> 20