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Silver: A free implementation of Swift for .NET, Java, Android, and Cocoa

elementscompiler.com

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Re: Silver: A free implementation of Swift for .NET, Java, Android, and Cocoa

#21

Post by ghuntley »

pistle wrote: post #7

Apple needs to buy this company in 3, 2, 1... This is an ideal start to countering the concepts from Xamarin out of the .net camp and I would love to see them build up some form of XAML-like UI tech and tooling for x-plat UI dev so you could push the envelope on code-reuse. That would take a big dump of capital. It would also make for a push in the market for this style of x-plat dev. If you can get to the major and…

Why not just write your app using F# w/Xamarin. Target iOS, Android, Windows Phone using a decent functional language.

Re: Silver: A free implementation of Swift for .NET, Java, Android, and Cocoa

#24

Post by meepmorp »

pistle wrote: post #7

Apple needs to buy this company in 3, 2, 1... This is an ideal start to countering the concepts from Xamarin out of the .net camp and I would love to see them build up some form of XAML-like UI tech and tooling for x-plat UI dev so you could push the envelope on code-reuse. That would take a big dump of capital. It would also make for a push in the market for this style of x-plat dev. If you can get to the major and…

Apple doesn't care about non-Apple platforms.

Re: Silver: A free implementation of Swift for .NET, Java, Android, and Cocoa

#26

Post by mukundmr »

Reading through the details dampened my excitement. It has proprietary extensions to the Swift language (http://docs.elementscompiler.com/Silver/LanguageExtensions/) and it has differences and limitations as well. (http://docs.elementscompiler.com/Silver/DifferencesAndLimita...).

They do however state it is free for use.

Re: Silver: A free implementation of Swift for .NET, Java, Android, and Cocoa

#27

Post by mythz »

martingordon wrote: post #22

I'm curious to know how well it performs. I spent the better part of this weekend rewriting 4k lines of Swift in Objective-C because I couldn't deal with the 60-90 second compile times.

Swift has some land mine issues where the compiler can hit snags handling certain snippets of code (e.g casting to/from Any/AnyObject, method overloading based on constraints, etc) which if you have enough of them will segfault the compiler with something along the lines of "expression too complicated, break it down".

I've had to rewrite my approach a few times because of this to avoid certain coding techniques, but once I've rewritten to avoid them, Swift can happily compile my 7-8k LOC code-base in ~6s.

Re: Silver: A free implementation of Swift for .NET, Java, Android, and Cocoa

#29

Post by pistle »

eridius wrote: post #11
pistle wrote: post #7

Apple needs to buy this company in 3, 2, 1... This is an ideal start to countering the concepts from Xamarin out of the .net camp and I would love to see them build up some form of XAML-like UI tech and tooling for x-plat UI dev so you could push the envelope on code-reuse. That would take a big dump of capital. It would also make for a push in the market for this style of x-plat dev. If you can get to the major and…

What possible reason would Apple have to buy this company?

Swift developers, building across platforms, can get their Apple-loving code into enterprises through the front door so Apple hardware can start coming through that way as well. Push the Apple brand via programming language in order to sell more hardware.

Is the longview really that a closed platform with a narrowly used language will increase the share of revenue from Mac sales?

Swift + walled garden are OK for selling phones, but for OSX to go beyond You buy this company because they love Swift and can help get a foothold on dev teams in the enterprise. No matter how many kids come up using Swift to make their phone apps, they are going to get pushed into building C# and java, and a bunch of other languages, using other hardware and tools, when they joins the ranks. You buy this company so you can control the direction of their efforts and use it to put more eggs in other baskets.

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