Swift Ported to Android • Hacker News Board

Re: Swift Ported to Android

#151

Post by fotidim » Wed, Mar 02, 2016, 9:51 AM UTC

Touche wrote: post #4

manojlds wrote: post #2

Interesting, in the context of Xamarin acquisition by Microsoft. Swift can very well spoil C#'s steam.

I would say that React Native is the biggest threat there.

As long as React Native requires the developer to use Javascript to write his code this is a no go for the sane of us.

Re: Swift Ported to Android

#152

Post by fotidim » Wed, Mar 02, 2016, 9:55 AM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #139

mikeash wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift doesn't have the slightest concept of UI. If you want to do UI work in Swift, you use whatever UI frameworks are available on your target platform. Since Swift interoperates very nicely with C and Objective-C, those frameworks can be written in those languages and still be usable from Swift. On OS X the framework happens to be Cocoa, but Swift isn't in any way tied to it. On Android, Swift will likely be in the…

And that there in is an issue. Android will never have a complete ndk API parity with Java. They've made this clear, and would be difficult since the Java API is implemented in Java (it's not a wrapper of ndk).

Don't expect to write entires Android apps in Swift. The best thing we can hope for is sharing crossplatform code among iOS, Android etc. And with Foundation ported this is fair amount of code.

Re: Swift Ported to Android

#153

Post by eggy » Sun, Mar 06, 2016, 5:33 PM UTC

andybak wrote: post #148

eggy wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried Haxe, Racket, TCL/tk, MOAI (Lua based), and others, but I am now using 8th, a Forth-like language that compiles to Android, iOS, Windows, OSX and Linux [1]. The only downside is that I still need a Mac to publish iOS apps. For Android, Windows and Linux, I am good to go. It uses the JUCE library for gui implementation. I have made two toy apps for Android so far, and I am still learning. It has a good libr…

What a strange beast! A closed source language is always a tricky sell. Forth is never an easy sell in itself (unless you've already been bitten by the bug ;-) in which case it's a wonderful bonus). The tutorial is PDF only - which just seems a bit odd. I'm intrigued by 8th - in a good way - and happy you've introduced me to it - but I do wonder what kind of uptake something like this will get.

It is a bit odd, but I am rocking with it. I have done Java and NDK in C++ tutorials to get simple programs running, but nothing original, or beyond what the tutorial provided. With 8th, I can whip up something quick with a GUI, using the sensors and other libs it comes with, and deploy it. It looks the same on Windows, Android and Linux. The developer makes him self available, and quite honestly, the code is succinct enough and the documentation good enough that I only asked a lot the first week. You should give it a try. I am by no means a 'Forth programmer', and 8th is not a compliant Forth.