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“Swift will be open source later this year”

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311–320 of 573 posts

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

#311
post #5

Well whaddaya know, I like the direction this is going with both Apple and Microsoft.

The direction is great, I think this shows that closed source programming languages are now definitely a thing of the past. However Apple has some catching up to do. Microsoft has opened .net to Apple platforms and is actively working on open source tools and language implementation for OSX. Apple did not announce Swift for Windows, so Swift will miss out on that part of the market until someone else picks this up.

Since it's LLVM based and Google and Microsoft are already porting clang/llvm to Windows, it's only a matter of time before Swift made available.

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

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not what OP was asking. WebRTC is a standard in the same way HTTP is a standard: it defines the API surface and transport for a particular set of features within the browser.

Signaling is intentionally missing from the WebRTC spec, and that is the "interesting" part here: without open and interoperable signaling, you're just preserving the status quo of proprietary video chat services such as FaceTime, Skype, Hangouts, etc. Just like HTTP enables proprietary services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc.

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

It feels much too pragmatic for my taste. Exactly the kind of thing to come out of Google, to solve their type of problem (scalability, deployment are much more important than the code itself). Personally I don't have googles problems (few of us do!) and I really like a good type system, with algebraic types/pattern matching/generics

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

#314
post #127
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. It was probably easier to port it to Linux. I can't see why they would intentionally avoid Microsoft (at least not at this point in their history).

Maybe MS will do it given they're porting ObjC.

Swift + .NET Framework would be interesting

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

#315
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Swift is a language and Qt is GUI framework

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.

True that Qt is a full C++ framework (my bad on that, i should know i use it everyday), but swift is nothing like QML.

QML is just a markup language that is interpreted by an engine written in C++, swift is a whole programming language that is compiled. It would be more fitting to compare C++ and swift than swift and Qt.

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

#316
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I knwo you can add discs via the USB port and with hub can have a fair few and can network share and backup to them. But not apple user fully and did look but found nothing to enable sync with iCloud beyond a desktop option, though may of missed something. Though did find this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204618 which pertains to remote desktop and related functionality done via your iCloud account, so maybe, though still need to access via iCloud, which if just athorisation would be ok if you had a fallback option.

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

#317

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. 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…

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…

It seems to me that Dart would be a more obvious choice should Google choose to push a new application development language for the Android platform. It's closer to JavaScript and has more GUI/visually-oriented libraries. Plus, it's a no-brainer to box such apps in a HTML5 container for iOS/Windows.

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

#318

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..

OS X Server is really a shell of the former product. It used to be a great small business / design studio server, but it has lost most of its use-case and I really question its use outside of a few Apple Device Management scenarios.

Almost all the documentation and best case expects Macs to be tied to an Active Directory / MS environment for management.

As a typical Web / LAMP host, OS X really is not that performant. Unix tools execute faster on a RHEL/CentOS box then an OS X (even if the OS X box has higher specs). MySQL is particularly bad if it hasn't been tuned, and most of the literature seems to indicate that OS X (or more specifically MACH) doesn't have the level of optimisation for server workloads.

That being said, if your using the OS X frameworks, there can be some great value with exceptional performance (just look at the startup using Mac Pros as image manipulation servers).

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

#319
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.

[deleted]

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

#320
post #299

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 K…

> There aren't even any plans to support lambdas and Java 8.

https://android-review.googlesource.com/#/c/150214/

Looks like there is someone at Google working on lambda support.

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