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

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

#281

Post by s73v3r » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:15 PM UTC

bitmapbrother wrote: post #212

melling wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, look me up in a year and explain why you were wrong. Go has been out for 6 years and has less than 10,000 questions on StackOverFlow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/go Swift has 37,000 questions in its first year: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/swift I'm a fan of Go. I built my websites in it and I've written a few small apps. However, you really are overlooking how much of a difference the…

Of course, all bets are off once Go becomes a first class citizen on Android.

While that would be nice, every indication is saying that Google has no interest in this right now.

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

#282

Post by bri3d » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

david-given wrote: post #257

astrodust wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is Apple's dialect supported, or only the NeXT version? (Which, TBF, has absolutely nothing wrong with it and is a great language; but it's not what people are writing these days.)

Objective-C 2.0 via Clang and the GNUStep ObjC2 runtime supports blocks, GCD, fast enumeration, declared properties, introspection.

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

#283

Post by alkonaut » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

Funny, for years people said Microsoft was Copying Apple. We'll never know but I can't help thinking that Microsofts recent push to open source dev tools and languages at least made this happen sooner than it would have. It's a great time to be a developer.

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

#284

Post by s73v3r » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:21 PM UTC

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 find it far less frustrating to use than Java, as it actually has decent generics.

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

#285

Post by chc » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:23 PM UTC

mooreds wrote: post #241

josteink wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said they would make facetime an open standard. Still waiting.

Here's a story about facetime: http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/facetime-open-standard-...

Are you sure this is why Apple went radio silent? Even if Apple was somehow prevented from publishing the standard (I don't see how a patent would prevent them from doing so, but whatever), that doesn't explain why they couldn't just say so.

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

#286

Post by jokr004 » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:23 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #255

jokr004 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely any reasonable person would recognize that it looks like swift will be open sourced, barring something unexpected.. You're nitpicking at someones choice of words and not adding anything valuable to the conversation.

I sincerely do not think "They pulled it off" versus "It looks like they will do this sometime in the next six months" is nitpicking somebody's choice of words. The difference between the two is not a minor nuance, it's a large practical difference, and I don't think people would necessarily understand the latter meaning from the former. When I first saw this thread, I certainly thought Apple had actually open-source…

Yeesh, ok I didn't realize the title was changed

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

#287

Post by enneff » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:26 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #167

LesZedCB wrote: 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!

Perhaps there is a lesson here.

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

#288

Post by jurre » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:27 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #105

yjgyhj wrote: post #51

People who talk about swift compare it to Rust and Go. I can see how the syntax is to ObjC what Go is to C++. Else but that, in what way is Swift anything like Go or Rust? To me (someone who does Lisp & JS, so none of these all) go seems cool for concurrency and being 'boring' (in a great way). Rust seems cool for being very robust and 'safe' (or hard to screw up with), while still doing concurrency nicely and lettin…

To name a few: Swift's type system is far more sophisticated (e.g. you can say "This is a list of numbers" and have it statically enforced that you don't accidentally stick a string in there), it does a lot of plain direct dispatch rather than Objective-C's dynamic-everything, and it uses a proper option type instead of having null landmines everywhere.

Objc just got dynamics :)

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

#289

Post by chc » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:31 PM UTC

jurre wrote: post #288

chc wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To name a few: Swift's type system is far more sophisticated (e.g. you can say "This is a list of numbers" and have it statically enforced that you don't accidentally stick a string in there), it does a lot of plain direct dispatch rather than Objective-C's dynamic-everything, and it uses a proper option type instead of having null landmines everywhere.

Objc just got dynamics :)

I'm confused. Objective-C has had dynamic typing, dynamic dispatch and dynamic pretty much everything for years. What does "just got dynamics" mean?

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

#290

Post by alkonaut » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:32 PM UTC

Frenchiie wrote: post #157

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…

> If i dont specify a type for my variable i should be able to change my variable's value to whatever type i want.

You mean you want to assign a string to a variable and then re-assign it to something else entirely such as a number?

Just reassigning at all is dubious in my opinion, and seeing a reassignment with a completely different type would make me flip the table in review.

If you ever want a "catch all" variable you can then explicitly type it as a base type like "object", and assign what you want. But that should be very rare, so it's perfectly natural that type inference assigns a static type to the field.

The only time you get bad inference is if you have subtypes and the first assignment is too narrow, e.g

Apple GetApple() { ... } var myFruit = GetApple(); // type is Apple if (cond) myFruit = GetOrange(); // can't assign orange

In this scenario you have to declare explicitly as Fruit. But again: this is rare, and all reassignment should be rare! Always have good reason before mutating anything.