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

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

#291

Post by Zenst » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:33 PM UTC

mozumder wrote: post #252

sjackso wrote: post #110

Earlier 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.

Apple needs to get the rest of OS X onto the server. They could build their own servers again (unlikely), or at least license OS X Server to Dell/HP/IBM/VMWare/etc..

I think Apple who did do servers at one time have found the consumer side of things more profitable. That said, they by not doing servers are seemed less hostile in server providing vender partnerships and this I believe would be more profitable for Apple than going into servers.

Now with the move of things into just the app bare bones style docker VM's in which the app is a service upon a server then maybe some form of runtime that enables some applications would be useful, maybe.

But if they went into the server market, then the trust of doing partnerships with server focused vendors would diminish. Though VMWare would probably be just as happy, if not more and that would be about it. IBM, for the arrangements they have now, work for both of them too well to upset I feel.

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

#292

Post by alkonaut » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:34 PM UTC

lobster_johnson wrote: post #258

pjungwir wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wondering for a while now why no one builds an Obj C backend for their apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9500855 Being able to deploy on Linux might be what it takes!

I long dreamed of using Objective C to build server apps. The compiler support has been there for years (GCC, later Clang), but there's no standard library. All the stuff you would want from Foundation is missing; strings, sockets, file I/O, encoding support, threads, etc., it turns out you'd have to reimplement a lot from scratch. There's GNUstep, but last I looked it, it was stagnant, and also very much geared towa…

Agree. Feels like a reasonable language to get things done and still readable. Much cleaner in design than Go, and let's not even discuss JS.

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

#293

Post by mooreds » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:35 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #285

mooreds wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not sure--definitely don't have any real knowledge about this issue. I was just looking for any info about the facetime issue and that came up in the search results.

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

#294

Post by digi_owl » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:36 PM UTC

Zenst wrote: post #291

mozumder wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple needs to get the rest of OS X onto the server. They could build their own servers again (unlikely), or at least license OS X Server to Dell/HP/IBM/VMWare/etc..

I think Apple who did do servers at one time have found the consumer side of things more profitable. That said, they by not doing servers are seemed less hostile in server providing vender partnerships and this I believe would be more profitable for Apple than going into servers. Now with the move of things into just the app bare bones style docker VM's in which the app is a service upon a server then maybe some form…

Back when they did servers they did it for two things, render farms and studio networking.

Render farms have largely been supplanted by Linux, and studio networking can either be handled by a Mini on the shelf or a Windows server in the closet.

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

#295

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:37 PM UTC

higherpurpose wrote: post #215

TillE wrote: 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.

It would certainly be all sorts of ironic if (many) more Android apps were written in Swift than Go, all because Google doesn't want to replace Java with Go and make it the primary language, while Apple is doing that with Swift.

[deleted]

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

#296

Post by mattdw » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:37 PM UTC

nvbn wrote: post #259

coldtea wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ve…

Have you tried Go, Scala or Rust? All of those language are from their separate leagues, how can you compare swift with them?

In my experience, in the wide world of programming languages Rust and Swift are really not very far apart. Swift's designers even cited Rust as an influence.

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

#297

Post by lukeh » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:40 PM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #203

lukeh wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's always just a SMOP, but my hunch is that Swift is way too integrated with the Apple runtime to not use it. I wouldn't be surprised if they have limited support for ObjC in their Swift Linux port, but happy to be proven wrong. (I started porting the Apple runtime to Linux last year but ran into the aforementioned linker issue. A way around it is to change the Apple runtime ABI on Linux of course.)

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

#298

Post by kh_hk » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:42 PM UTC

htns wrote: post #278

kh_hk wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QML is akin to swift. Let's say, QML is to Qt as Swift is to Obj-C + native GUI libraries. The purpose and syntax of QML and Swift are similar, too. PS: Qt is not only a GUI framework. It's a cross platform C++ framework.

QML is a declarative UI markup language with javascript scripting. Are there really any parallels to Swift? I haven't looked at it in any detail before.

I hadn't looked much into Swift either, thought it was meant to be a declarative layer around Obj-C, my bad.

I would say though that QML + javascript fills a similar purpose as Swift.

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

#299

Post by jophde » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:42 PM UTC

Please for the love of all things holy please stop saying Swift would be great for Android or that Google is porting Go to Android. As an Android developer for the past four years I can assure you that there is zero evidence that Google is moving the Android FRAMEWORK to Go. There aren't even any plans to support lambdas and Java 8. Also, pretty much everyone on the bleeding edge of Android is planning on moving to Kotlin. It has even more higher level and functional abstractions than Swift or Go, full interoperability with Java (even in the same file), and almost no performance hit.

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

#300

Post by Tloewald » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 9:42 PM UTC

djur wrote: post #226

coldtea wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? Is there any platform that has first class support for more than 1-2 languages?

Unix. The 'native' language there is C but there are dozens of languages that are well-supported. They can interoperate through OS-level abstractions like pipes and via C APIs on at the process level. The average Unix desktop or server is probably running code written in 5-10 languages, more or less transparently to the user.

> They can interoperate through OS-level abstractions like pipes and via C APIs on at the process level.

And you can't do this in OSX or iOS?

> The average Unix desktop or server is probably running code written in 5-10 languages, more or less transparently to the user

The average iPhone is probably running code written in just as many (if not more) languages - C, C++, Obj-C, Swift, and Javascript are a given before you even look at third party stuff. And, modulo sandboxing, you can do all the Unix stuff too.