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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”

#341

Post by Tloewald »

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 write an OS you simply need to be able to compile code that can be launched by a bootloader. That's it. You don't need explicit control over the layout of your data structures in memory.

I'd hazard that the engineers at Apple are perfectly qualified to identify what is and isn't a "systems language" working for one of the few companies that has actually developed several from scratch (I am referring to A/UX, Mac OS Classic, Newton OS, and NeXTStep / OpenStep / OSX / iOS in case you're wondering).

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

#342

Post by [deleted] »

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).

[deleted]

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

#343

Post by Tloewald »

coldtea wrote: post #176
nickysielicki wrote: post #161

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…

> 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…

It seems to me that Microsoft and Apple are -- quite consciously -- in a war to own the next ubiquitous language (the precursors being Javascript, PHP, Java, C++, C, Fortran, and COBOL). This is the language that Comp Sci students will spend their time in, that kids and hobbyists will tinker with, and so on. It's a huge deal -- the stakes are enormous.

C# was in good shape and got better with Microsoft's recent cross-platform moves; Swift has started way behind, but is doing very, very well.

Luckily for us, the two languages are not worlds apart. Crossing from one to the other won't be a terrible thing -- so lean back and enjoy your popcorn.

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

#344

Post by untog »

aaggarwal wrote: post #154
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.

I agree, with the type of growth Swift has shown in the past, there is going to be a big demand for Swift developers now. Swift could possibly rule the mobile/web. I have already added it on my #TODO list :)

I doubt Swift will rule the web. Javascript has yet to be dethroned by any other language coming before it, after all.

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

#345

Post by jophde »

myko wrote: post #320
jophde wrote: 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.

Maybe but this won't ship until at least M so if you min SDK is even as new as KitKat it won't help you much.

Kotlin gives you lambdas, named parameters, extension functions (like C#), data classes, first class null, and more today on all versions of Android.

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

#346

Post by threeseed »

chimeracoder wrote: post #260
threeseed wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has a precedent for open source technologies like this. And let's be honest Swift is great and all but it's hardly the crown jewels of the company they are giving away.

> Apple has a precedent for open source technologies like this. They also have a precedent for being less than friendly towards FOSS[0][1][2][3], despite the way they try to present themselves otherwise by listing their open source contributions prominently. Note that the author of these comments, saurik, is Jay Freeman, the creator of Cydia. Key quotes include: > Apple has simply never been in compliance with the LG…

Those are from 4 years ago. Something more recent would be useful.

Especially since their contributions to LLVM, GCD, WebKit2 have been quite notable.

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

#347

Post by untog »

higherpurpose wrote: post #208
LesZedCB wrote: post #6

I remember a thread on HN [1] from a few months ago talking about how apple was never going to do this. I'm so glad they were able to pull it off! Good for you, Apple! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8488808

Or Apple saw that and decide to change its mind. Sometimes companies change their minds this way, like how Microsoft changed its mind on the banning of DVDs for Xbox, even though they never "officially" said they would do that before the announcement of the Xbox One, but it was strongly "rumored" they would do that. I'm sure that's what they intended, but the outrage was too big to let it be.

They could have also been influenced by MS open sourcing .NET - it's difficult to compete if you don't keep up.

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

#348

Post by jophde »

edko wrote: post #309
jophde wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Very true. I am starting to not see the point of Go. It's about the same performance as the JVM languages and the JVM is just as easy to deploy. On the JVM you get to choose between Clojure, Scala, Ruby, Groovy, Kotlin, and more. JVM is just as easy to deploy as a Go binary too. Personally, I plan to stick with JVM languages plus Rust.

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

#349

Post by Tloewald »

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…

> Why would I ever care about Go for Android when I can write apps in Kotlin

Power consumption.

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

#350

Post by pivo »

melling wrote: post #210
thebouv wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Do you realize how far Java reaches into the enterprise? And with Swift's focus still being around the walled garden of iOS/OSX development, even with the open sourcing there are many more "IFs" to achieve before Swift rivals Java in adoption. Don't get me wrong. I don't use Java and I have made apps for iOS (though not with Swift yet unfortunately). I like Swift and intend on trying it. But rivaling Java? Cert…

Yes, I've done Java in the enterprise. It's a 20 year old language and there's an estimated 9 million Java developers. Swift is only one1 but with open source and cross-platform ability (Microsoft will port to Windows), I think we have several million Swift developers with 5 years. [Update] 30 -> 20

As much as I like Swift, without real garbage collection I wouldn't want to use it an any enterprise project. Keeping track of ownership of reference counted objects shared between who knows how many other objects sounds like a nightmare.
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