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

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

#321

Post by TheMagicHorsey » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:30 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #313

eatonphil wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I use Go a lot for backend stuff, and I agree with you. There is a lot of stuff you can do with interfaces to ameliorate the lack of generics--but you still end up missing generics and algebraic types.

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

#322

Post by spion » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:30 PM UTC

supster wrote: post #163

geocar wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should call it Swift On Sails.

Haha, yeah though Sails is also a Rails like framework for JavaScript http://sailsjs.org/#!/

I guess it was either that or Jails

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

#323

Post by s73v3r » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:33 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #57

sondr3 wrote: post #5

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

I'll second that when Apple and MS will support Vulkan on their OSes and open codecs in their browsers. Or to put it another way, when they'll stop using sickening lock-in to make life harder for everyone.

I didn't know that one could only use the browser that was installed on the system.

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

#324

Post by s73v3r » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:34 PM UTC

shmerl wrote: post #57

sondr3 wrote: post #5

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

I'll second that when Apple and MS will support Vulkan on their OSes and open codecs in their browsers. Or to put it another way, when they'll stop using sickening lock-in to make life harder for everyone.

As far as Vulkan goes, that seems to be on the graphics manufacturers.

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

#325

Post by s73v3r » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:38 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #65

> 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?

Well, they do use Linux on their backend. I'm guessing they needed OS X and Linux support, so that's what they contributed. Let someone else do the Windows support.

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

#326

Post by gress » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:41 PM UTC

fixermark wrote: post #113

honest_joe wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open Source did not win. In fact it destroyed a lot of potential markets. With this move Apple is dragging more and more developers that would be interested in Go/ Java (aka Android world) to its net. This is a win for Apple only.

Part of me says that any ecosystem that can be 'destroyed' by something as simple as near-zero-cost copying of product should never really have been a 'market' to begin with. We don't hear a lot about the sunshine or oxygen markets.

We do actually. It's called the real estate market, and Sunshine and Oxygen are built into the pricing.

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

#327

Post by s73v3r » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:41 PM UTC

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #74

Hmm they said they wanted Swift used everywhere for the next 20 years, they're going to make it open sourced and provide builds for iOS, Mac and Linux...but not Windows which is one of the largest operating systems in the world? I'm guessing they really don't want it used everywhere. Though knowing Microsoft they'll take Swift and implement support for it in Visual Studio.

They don't really use Windows themselves. They ported it to the platforms they use. Let someone else, probably Microsoft, do it.

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

#328

Post by wzdd » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:42 PM UTC

fleitz wrote: post #108

wiremine wrote: post #98

Apple explicitly said they see Swift as a systems language... curious what people thing about that. Does it compete with C/Rust, or is it just a pipe dream/marketing message?

It's designed to give it hype, it's not a systems language. The first question you should ask for any systems language is how to I integrate assembler, when the answer is to use C / C++ then you know it's not a systems language. Also, how you can tell a language is a systems language, it has an operating system written in it used by a large user base. How do you layout a struct in Swift so that it's the exact size an…

To be fair, you don't have complete control over struct memory layout in standard C, either, and C is certainly a systems language. The compiler can choose to add padding where it likes. Pragma pack, attribute(packed) etc are compiler extensions.

Edit: You can also link against .o files with Swift, which is the only sane way to integrate assembly language anyway (i.e. in a separate compilation unit).

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

#329

Post by s73v3r » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:42 PM UTC

robgibbons wrote: post #213

aerovistae wrote: post #190

Can someone explain what it means for a language like this to be open source? I sort of get it for Python, means you can download the C files and mess with them. But isn't Swift written in like Assembly?

It's potentially great news. It means I potentially don't need to own a Macbook Pro and use XCode just to build apps for iOS. Fuck that shit.

Ummm, you still need a Mac to do so. Just like you need Windows to make Windows apps.

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

#330

Post by BigChiefSmokem » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:49 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #202

artursapek wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is where companies like Xamarin and JetBrains can pick up the slack as they have with the Microsoft stack. As long as it's (legitimately) opened-sourced, of course.