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Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

swift.org

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Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#191

Post by bluepizza »

easeout wrote: post #179
bluepizza wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this reaction. Almost every language in the world: here's the spec, the tooling, and everything you need to use, master, and expand this language. Please use it. Apple: sorry, Mac only. Like, I want Apple to do the bare minimum that everyone else is doing.

Swift announced Linux support in 2015 when it went open source. Aspects of parity have taken years, and the Objective-C interop that isn't relevant outside Apple platforms but made adoption take off at all occupied a lot of early effort, but every Swift talk at FOSDEM today was about embedded or Linux server applications, or platform-agnostic C++ and Java interop. What can you possibly mean by "Mac only" or "bare min…

Core libs and foundation for starters?

https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#192

Post by geodel »

st3fan wrote: post #43
isodev wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really being released? Although some parts of the language and build chains are technically open source (as in, you can see the code), the project is still completely controlled by Apple at the top.

You are wrong about "some parts" - you can browse github.com/swiftlang to find out. About control - serious question: how is this different from for example Rust, Go, Zig or Python? For each of those you can submit a change proposal through an official process and you can submit code changes through a pull request. But also for each of those there is a non-zero chance that a smaller group of people who do governance…

Basically, if companies who created language dump it on Github and let open source community take over it is nonviable. Because who will pay for project development that these mega corps dumped on community and washed their hands off.

On the other hand if companies take ownership, provide financing, design, vision, evolution of language, compiler, libraries and ecosystem etc it is nonviable because it is dictatorship now.

Solution is to let drive by commentators to have full commit rights on open source repositories if they want to change any part of language. Anything less unacceptable.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#193

Post by fastball »

aristofun wrote: post #177

Swift itself is a great piece of tech. But it is doomed to fail as a general widely adopted language unless apple makes few critical moves including open sourcing everything including XCode, providing support for 3d party IDE developers (because xcode is terrible), creating decent package manager, adopting testing as first class citizen etc. There is just no economical sense for anyone to invest in swift until all th…

Your wishlist seems midly contradictory. Why does Apple need to open-source XCode if they also provide support for 3rd party IDEs (which they already do, btw)? Also what do you not like about cocoapods for package management?

Plenty of people make an incredible amount of money building apps in Swift, so your last sentence is just wrong.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#194

Post by paulddraper »

gruuuk wrote: post #157
jitl wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this reaction. Apple: here, we're open-sourcing this previously closed-source Apple-specific thing that made Swift better on Apple platforms. We're moving the Apple stuff into a plugin so Windows and Linux can be equal peers to Apple in the new system. We've implemented preliminary support for Windows & Linux and plan to continue work to bring them up to parity. Hacker News: I believe that this long game…

They should have been fully open source with full linux support and parity since day one. That would actually help the language get traction. At this point it's a dying language.

Lol, as long as it’s the preferred programming language for the most lucrative consumer devices ever, it cannot die.

Impossible to argue otherwise.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#196

Post by fastball »

easeout wrote: post #186
aristofun wrote: post #177

Swift itself is a great piece of tech. But it is doomed to fail as a general widely adopted language unless apple makes few critical moves including open sourcing everything including XCode, providing support for 3d party IDE developers (because xcode is terrible), creating decent package manager, adopting testing as first class citizen etc. There is just no economical sense for anyone to invest in swift until all th…

For what it's worth, they ship a solid VS Code extension and LSP. Their swift-testing package is the new open source and cross-platform successor to XCTest. The same can be said of swift-foundation as compared to Foundation. The path they've chosen is not to open source Xcode, but to move the things Swift needs on all platforms to the Swift language project and common implementations. Personally I think the main prob…

Are there any LLVM langs that have fast compile times? I think that just kinda comes with the territory of having that IR step + all the optimizations that happen at compile time to help runtime performance.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#197

Post by liontwist »

kelnos wrote: post #85
uhura wrote: post #36

I believe that this long game of Swift being "good for everything" but "better for Apple platforms" will be detrimental to the language. This does not help the language nor seems to bring more people to the ecosystem. Competitors seems to have a combination of: - Being more open-source - Have more contributors - Have a narrower scope Maybe they should consider open sourcing all the tooling (like Xcode) otherwise the…

This feels similar to C# and Microsoft's other CLR/.NET languages. Sure, they've broken away a bit and aren't exclusively used to run things on MS platforms, but still. And Swift is even more tied to Apple, at least to my inexperienced eye. I'm not really an Apple person (Linux, Android), even though I once really enjoyed their hardware... Swift is so far down on my list of languages to look at that I probably will n…

.net core is one of the best ways to write linux backend applications.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#198

Post by joseda-hg »

privacyis1mp wrote: post #138
hu3 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people familiar with macos or ios development who want to write for other platforms. This is a rather small userbase when it comes to enterprise. Especially because Swift will never be as versatile as Python or as efficient as Rust. And then there's also Go, C# and Kotlin with much better tooling.

Xcode gives me such a hard time that I started considering writing in Kotlin for macOS, just to have a normal IDE. We used to have AppCode (from JetBrains) and it was great. I wonder why Apple didn't support JetBrains, after all, it would have been to Apple's benefit.

There's even history of it working before, with Google / Kotlin

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#199

Post by marxisttemp »

GeekyBear wrote: post #116
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my experience for a long time. Swift is nice but why would I waste my time working on a language that is too tied to the Apple platform even if it's open-source when we have more universal scripting languages like Python, or languages like Kotlin that are compiled but have more support (because I trust JetBrains way more than Apple at the moment), or languages that are most strict like Rust but have mor…

> languages that are most strict like Rust but have more momentum and safety? Like Rust, Swift is a compiled language that offers memory safety by default. The creator of Clang and LLVM also created Swift, and interoperability with C was an explicit design goal. So Swift offers the memory safety and data race safety of Rust, in a compiled language, without giving up tight integration with C. (To be fair, better C int…

The creator of Rust also briefly worked on Swift

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#200

Post by easeout »

bluepizza wrote: post #191
easeout wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift announced Linux support in 2015 when it went open source. Aspects of parity have taken years, and the Objective-C interop that isn't relevant outside Apple platforms but made adoption take off at all occupied a lot of early effort, but every Swift talk at FOSDEM today was about embedded or Linux server applications, or platform-agnostic C++ and Java interop. What can you possibly mean by "Mac only" or "bare min…

Core libs and foundation for starters? https://www.swift.org/blog/future-of-foundation/

This, right?

https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-foundation

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