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Google forked Swift

github.com

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Re: Google forked Swift

#11

Post by geofft »

Google corporate policy, to the best of my knowledge (I do not and have never worked for Google but I asked lots of questions when evaluating an offer), is that it's significantly easier to let Google retain copyright on your open source work, and if it's on GitHub you have to host your repo at github.com/google if Google retains copyright.

("Forks" with no code changes ending up at the top of HN, as if they signaled a major shift in corpprate strategy, are an excellent example of why I think this is a bad policy. For all we know some Google employee PR'd a typo fix they noticed one weekend and has since deleted the branch.)

Re: Google forked Swift

#13

Post by revelation »

nawtacawp wrote: post #8
kvirani wrote: post #4

What does this mean in terms of their adoption / integration of the language?

I only remember reading a small tidbit about this last year: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-sw... "Google is said to be considering Swift as a ‘first class’ language for Android" "About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is co…

They integrated Kotlin with the very recent 3.0 version of Android Studio.

Re: Google forked Swift

#14

Post by DannyBee »

This is being used as a staging place for putting patches so they can be turned into pull requests, nothing more. Sorry to bust any conspiracy theories.

(You can see this happens on >100 of the swift forks :P)

Re: Google forked Swift

#15

Post by devdoomari »

nawtacawp wrote: post #2

Perhaps this is the start of moving Android Apps to Swift. Which, per rumor was considered last year: "About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language for Android" https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google…

maybe 'was'? kotlin is the official google's recommendation for android now... (and kotlin can have multiple 'backends' -- e.g. build-to-java / native / web / etc)

Re: Google forked Swift

#16

Post by adamnemecek »

nawtacawp wrote: post #2

Perhaps this is the start of moving Android Apps to Swift. Which, per rumor was considered last year: "About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language for Android" https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google…

If I were Google I would just invest into the native, LLVM-backed Kotlin thing. I guess the advantage of Swift would be using 1 lang for 2 platforms but at the end of the day the APIs are different enough that idk if it would matter.

Re: Google forked Swift

#17

Post by reustle »

ringaroundthetx wrote: post #9
rainboiboi wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be great news. Unification of mobile programming language.

React is good enough for most of the mobile projects out there. Hint: its none of the ones you use.

React Native hasn't lost its PATENTS file yet, so no other large company would bank heavily on it.

Re: Google forked Swift

#18

Post by lexlash »

Hi! I’m one of the engineers on this. We’ve got some work we’re collaborating on - all of which is going upstream - and we wanted a shared place to stage it while we prepare PRs. I’ll be pushing a statement to our fork tomorrow.

(I’m personally working on Bazel rules and contributions to lib/Syntax. If you find that exciting, please get in touch! :)

Re: Google forked Swift

#19

Post by dikaiosune »

DannyBee wrote: post #14

This is being used as a staging place for putting patches so they can be turned into pull requests, nothing more. Sorry to bust any conspiracy theories. (You can see this happens on >100 of the swift forks :P)

parent's HN bio:

> I run all the production and cloud programming language teams at Google, and am also an open source lawyer.

Re: Google forked Swift

#20

Post by ringaroundthetx »

reustle wrote: post #17
ringaroundthetx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React is good enough for most of the mobile projects out there. Hint: its none of the ones you use.

React Native hasn't lost its PATENTS file yet, so no other large company would bank heavily on it.

yeah but we're not talking large companies
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