Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Swift is Open Source

swift.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 458 posts

Re: Swift is Open Source

#221

Post by ecopoesis »

sopooneo wrote: post #208
ecopoesis wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. This is a childish joke, and inappropriate. As a community of professionals, we should do everything we can to discourage this kind of crap. Joe Cumbo (mooman219), I hope you never apply for a job I'm the hiring manager for, because I would never hire you after seeing this kind of unprofessionalism in your Github profile.

I likely agree with your sentiment, but I'm afraid I'm too ignorant to even realize there is any attempt at a joke. For my understanding of the culture, would someone mind explaining?

Apple doesn't like the GPL3 and has refused to upgrade many key MacOS components (like bash) that have migrated from GPL2 to GPL3.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#222

Post by Scarbutt »

ruddct wrote: post #49

A lot of folks to thank at Apple right now, can't wait until all of this propagates so we can take a look at what's new in Swift 3. Two thoughts: - VERY happy to see the open sourcing of much of the Foundation libraries (which includes strings, dates, networking primitives, concurrency/task queues, I/O, etc). It'll provide a very strong start and make working with Swift immediately productive. - Holy crap, there's a…

so we can take a look at what's new in Swift 3

Are new versions backwards compatible?

Re: Swift is Open Source

#223

Post by pjmlp »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #196
thinkpad20 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad they didn't write it in Objective-C, as this would probably make compilation on Linux much harder (I have no idea what the state of Linux support for Objective-C is). As for writing it in Swift itself, that's not possible until Swift is sufficiently stable and with enough library support. Which it may or may not have now, but certainly didn't have when they started ;)

Linux support for ObjC is great on the compiler side (GCC supports the full language), but none of the core libraries are available. You can get some stuff (NSString, NSDictionary and so on) through GNUstep, but last I checked it was an uphill battle to be truly productive with ObjC on Linux.

It has hardly changed since the days I used AfterStep and WindowMaker (early 2000).

Re: Swift is Open Source

#225

Post by oflannabhra »

inglor wrote: post #120

Am I the only one who finds it odd that while pushing two high level but performant languages (Objective-C and Swift) Apple wrote their Swift compiler in C++?

Lattner directly addresses this in a FAQ in the repository[1] "Do you plan to rewrite the Swift compiler in Swift?

Not in the short term. C++ is a very pragmatic language for implementing compilers, since it has good performance characteristics and allows higher-level programming idioms than C.

That said, we do expect Swift to a better language than C++ in a number of ways, so why don't we implement the compiler itself in Swift? There are a couple of reasons that bootstrapping is not a good idea, at least in the short term:

This complicates bringup of the compiler, because you have to move both the compiled language and the compiler at the same time as the language evolves. We want the language evolution and direction to be driven by general purpose programming challenges, not by the specific needs of compiler hackers. The urge to "scratch our own itch" might be too great. That said, we are writing the runtime library in Swift itself. We may also decide to rewrite the compiler in Swift sometime in the distant future when the language settles down. At that point, it may be a good opportunity to revisit previous (internal to the compiler) design decisions, and we do expect and hope Swift to be a great language for doing many things, including implementing compilers."

1. https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/www/FAQ.rst

Re: Swift is Open Source

#228

Post by trishume »

inglor wrote: post #120

Am I the only one who finds it odd that while pushing two high level but performant languages (Objective-C and Swift) Apple wrote their Swift compiler in C++?

Because it is based on LLVM and the main LLVM API is C++ based. And no other language has good C++ interoperation.

Yes other languages have LLVM bindings, but they aren't as comprehensive as actually linking to the LLVM C++ API.

Source: Have written a (toy-ish) compiler with LLVM

Re: Swift is Open Source

#229

Post by rimantas »

ecopoesis wrote: post #210
corndoge wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I would never want to work for you if you've such a dearth of humor :P Exactly how is this inappropriate?

A company that is traditionally hostile to open source gets as one of its first "contributions" to a newly opened project a troll, confirming a bad stereotype of the open source community. How could that not be considered inappropriate?

Apple is in now way hostile to OSS.

Re: Swift is Open Source

#230

Post by cbeach »

distances wrote: post #194
cbeach wrote: post #86

Such good news. I've bet my career on Scala, but Swift is sufficiently similar in style that it will be an easy transition. A language to write native (not VM-based) apps for the desktop, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, CarPlay and Apple TV is becoming very compelling indeed.

It doesn't work like that, you can't "bet your career" on a language. Either you are interested in continuous learning or you aren't, and it's pretty clear which one is a better choice when choosing between multiple employee candidates.

It does actually work like that, for me. I'm in my mid thirties and have worked in financial software development for over a decade. Given the day rate I'm earning for Scala development, I will be able to retire comfortably long before Scala goes out of fashion.

Of course, I'll still be coding for fun after I've retired, so I'm looking forward to learning Swift in my spare time, alongside the other languages I code regularly in.

Post reply on HN