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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”

#301

Post by fleitz »

the_af wrote: post #246
fleitz wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

im saying those with a propensity to build such systems invariably choose strongly typed languages and in those languages that is the culture and the language encourages it. Eg.rewriting base classes to use IWritableStream instead of looking up the write method and calling it.

You seem to be confusing Java-like interfaces and design patterns with types. That's not representative of what great type systems can do for you.

I'm confusing types and 'Java-like interfaces and design patterns' to the same degree that you're confusing swift's type system with 'what great type systems can do for you.'

The type system of swift is much closer to java than to that of haskell. (Or whatever language you think has a 'great' type system)

For example in F# if you just use one method the type system will infer that you need an object that has that method. (especially if that method is an operator)

eg. let add a b = a + b will work on any pair of objects that have the + operator defined. That is a good and useful type system, what swift has just makes you type more for little benefit.

eg. making types is easy, reflecting methods is hard. (it should be noted that swift effectively doesn't support reflection)

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

#302

Post by Sanddancer »

jallmann wrote: post #156
Sanddancer wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebRTC is works under Firefox and Chrome, and is standardized.

WebRTC services are still, for the most part, isolated silos. There is no effort made to federate or interoperate between services. For that, you want something like SIP or XMPP/Jingle.

While true, my point was more that there /are/ standardized ways of doing that, and there is no barrier to apple working on and/or with standards bodies to discuss any concerns they have with WebRTC, SIP, etc.

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

#303

Post by Zenst »

digi_owl wrote: post #294
Zenst wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very true and probably more so when Job was somewhat into computer render animation. That and attention to a good working audio driver setup and API's have helped keep Apple still in the audio DAW industry. AS you say much has changed and can see why they shifted focus. Though I do as many wish they at least had a server flavour, more so given would not be much to change I feel as to what is already there. But exposure to a consumer messing up and a sever messing up can be vastly different in support/costs to make sure 100% right and less customers.

Still they do like consumerising things and who knows, personal home iCloud that sits in your home would perhaps be a likely server offering if any they may take as targeting consumers. That if any route is maybe the one that could happen.

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

#304

Post by tammer »

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..

Why when the aftermarket will do it for them?

http://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros

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

#305

Post by digi_owl »

Zenst wrote: post #303
digi_owl wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very true and probably more so when Job was somewhat into computer render animation. That and attention to a good working audio driver setup and API's have helped keep Apple still in the audio DAW industry. AS you say much has changed and can see why they shifted focus. Though I do as many wish they at least had a server flavour, more so given would not be much to change I feel as to what is already there. But exposu…

Don't they already offer that via their Airport range of routers? I seem to recall they offer file storage/backup, perhaps even with a iCloud link.

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

#306

Post by joshuak »

I am very much against the way Cocoa & Cocoa Touch work (a "ViewController" is NOT!!! a controller in the MVC sense), and Interface Builder makes me want to take a high powered rifle to Cupertino, but Swift is definitely a winner now that it's going open source.

I rebuilt a dysfunctional OS X application that was ported from iOS (obj-c) from the ground up almost entirely in Swift last year, and really enjoyed working in swift. It's worlds better than Objective C, and compares favorably with other modern languages like Go (which I also like and use quite a lot). It takes a minute and a bit of annoyance to get used to optionals, but that ends up being really nice for issues most languages let you shoot yourself in the foot on. Along with switch patterns, easy immutability, memory management, string handling, and Playgrounds/REPL make it a really pleasure.

Even with that endorsement I couldn't recommend it seriously for anyone without being cross platform / open source. Now I can say I really think it's worth learning.

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

#307

Post by fleitz »

coldtea wrote: post #187
fleitz wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This seems to conflate type systems with interfaces -- while not really having a clear idea what the latter serve either...

No, it's that there's a limited amount of space to communicate my ideas and I chose brevity over clarity. I also use the common definition of terms over academic preciseness because I'm trying broad thoughts on a forum rather than a formal dissertation on type systems.

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

#308

Post by eatonphil »

alkonaut wrote: post #280
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.

It's great news. Hopefully there will be a node-like ecosystem for writing small services on Linux soon. With F#, Swift and C# available, hopefully the proliferation of Javascript can be slowed on the server (without people running to Go).

Just curious, why do you say that (about Go)?

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

#309

Post by edko »

jophde wrote: post #268
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…

Why would I ever care about Go for Android when I can write apps in Kotlin? Kotlin is fully interoperable with Java. I don't have much experience with Swift but Kotlin is so nice. It has the best features from numerous languages such as Ruby. C#, etc. It's being made by Jetbrains who makes the the core of Android Studio so it will have support. Kotlin is also nearly as fast at runtime as Java with a tiny 200kb runtim…

If you use Scala for your view layer, why would you even want to use Go for your back end?

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

#310

Post by kibwen »

nemothekid wrote: post #235
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…

OTOH There are 70k Go repos on GitHub vs 31k for Swift (vs ~5k for Rust) - https://github.com/search?l=go&q=stars%3A%3E-1&ref=searchres... - https://github.com/search?l=swift&q=stars%3A%3E-1&ref=search... - https://github.com/search?l=rust&q=stars%3A%3E-1&ref=searchr...

The numbers of results there vary wildly upon refreshing the page repeatedly. I'm getting ranges of 39k-79k for Go, 12k-42k for Swift, and 3k-9k for Rust. Also, in the absence of knowledge of what precisely is being measured (e.g. does it include forks?), we should probably only interpret these numbers as order-of-magnitude comparisons.
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