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

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

#331

Post by joshuak » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:50 PM UTC

joshuak wrote: post #306

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…

Haha, apparently down voters don't read entire messages. But yay last post! I win. :)

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

#332

Post by foxhop » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:53 PM UTC

http://youtu.be/Pm8P4oCIY3g this is a talk by Joyant's Bryan Cantrill where he make the case that announcing something is going to be open sourced in the future is bad and is an anti pattern.

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

#333

Post by kristopolous » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:55 PM UTC

sjackso wrote: post #110

cpr wrote: 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.

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.

The fact that I don't use OSX has been a barrier to getting better at iOS development. Hackintoshing has proven to be quite elusive and the vmware and vbox USB layers in Linux don't convince virtualized OSX enough to transfer over apps to my iDevices. I'm not convinced you can get to high quality by testing strictly on emulators.

If anyone has an old mac that can run modern xCode (you probably know what this constitutes more than me) and wants to donate it to a dedicated open-source developer for completely unspecified future projects, feel free to email me at (my handle on hn)@(googles email service). thanks

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

#334

Post by mitchty » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:57 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.

It also suggests that swift version 2.0 isn't out yet and they don't want to deal with open sourcing it until then or have to go through lawyers regardless.

If you followed Chris Lattner on the dev forums he always gave the impression that they wanted it open source from the start but had bigger fish to fry. They reimplemented a ton of the compiler multiple times after finding bugs in the existing language specs. Don't read too far into this that microsoft forced anything. For one, we'll never know and this is at best conjecture.

As for supporting diverse execution environments, I'd argue llvm/clang/webkit proves otherwise. Granted they're not "supporting" it in the sense that they're selling support for it but I'm not sure exactly who would meet your criteria right now.

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

#335

Post by shmerl » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:57 PM UTC

s73v3r wrote: post #323

shmerl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In case of Apple's iOS - only browser which uses their engine. Another sick lock-in example.

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

#336

Post by brudgers » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 10:58 PM UTC

BigChiefSmokem wrote: post #330

brudgers wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Xamarin and Jetbrains live in the enterprise market. It's hard to see Swift quickly gaining traction in that space.

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

#337

Post by jbk » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 11:03 PM UTC

s73v3r wrote: post #329

robgibbons wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't need Windows to make Windows apps. MingW and Wine work very fine on Linux.

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

#338

Post by gsnedders » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 11:04 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.

CoreFoundation has a MakefileLinux[1] for versions since 635 (corresponding to 10.7, if I'm not mistaken) — anybody know the status of that? It obviously relies on Clang (as it uses various extensions), but does it build, is it useful?

[1]: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/CF/CF-1151.16/Makefil...

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

#339

Post by tachion » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 11:07 PM UTC

stock_toaster wrote: post #147

Hoping that at some point it gets ported to FreeBSD too!

Most likely it will - some talking about that was already happening on IRC ;) However, its a bit shame, that company that gets so much from BSD's (OSX userland is FreeBSD derived) have not decided to give such a thing back.

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

#340

Post by Dewie3 » Mon, Jun 08, 2015, 11:07 PM UTC

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?

Straight from the developer marketing mouth:

> Swift is a successor to both the C and Objective-C languages.

https://developer.apple.com/swift/