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

“Swift will be open source later this year”

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 573 posts

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#221

Post by JustSomeNobody »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #212
melling wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, look me up in a year and explain why you were wrong. Go has been out for 6 years and has less than 10,000 questions on StackOverFlow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/go Swift has 37,000 questions in its first year: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/swift I'm a fan of Go. I built my websites in it and I've written a few small apps. However, you really are overlooking how much of a difference the…

Of course, all bets are off once Go becomes a first class citizen on Android.

This cannot happen soon enough.

I'm not saying this because of anything to do with Apple's Swift announcement. I'm saying this because it'll be a huge benefit to Android.

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#223

Post by pixelmonkey »

Surprising, but good news. When Swift was originally announced, I suggested on HN that if they didn't open source it, long term, it would go "the way of Flash" -- eventually, developers would abandon it in favor of more open platform technologies.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7851583

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#224

Post by steveklabnik »

delinka wrote: post #206
steveklabnik wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty interesting question: Microsoft has CodePlex, but has also been using GitHub quite a bit lately. Will Apple put Swift as part of http://www.opensource.apple.com/ , or start using GitHub? https://github.com/apple seems to be squatted...

How can you tell that's a squatter and not Apple?

Sorry, I didn't mean to make that distinction, I just mean that _someone_ has control over this username.

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#225

Post by JustSomeNobody »

candl wrote: post #129
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #74

Hmm they said they wanted Swift used everywhere for the next 20 years, they're going to make it open sourced and provide builds for iOS, Mac and Linux...but not Windows which is one of the largest operating systems in the world? I'm guessing they really don't want it used everywhere. Though knowing Microsoft they'll take Swift and implement support for it in Visual Studio.

Microsoft is actually building an Objective-C runtime for Windows 10 aka Project Islandwood as a bridge for iOS apps to run on Windows. https://dev.windows.com/en-us/uwp-bridges/project-islandwood https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9471204 So ironically this announcement might benefit Microsoft a lot.

And if I were Apple, I would not have a problem letting MS foot the bill for the development costs. :)

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#226

Post by djur »

coldtea wrote: post #188
untog wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not with first-class support is isn't.

So? Is there any platform that has first class support for more than 1-2 languages?

Unix. The 'native' language there is C but there are dozens of languages that are well-supported. They can interoperate through OS-level abstractions like pipes and via C APIs on at the process level. The average Unix desktop or server is probably running code written in 5-10 languages, more or less transparently to the user.

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#227

Post by JustSomeNobody »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #74

Hmm they said they wanted Swift used everywhere for the next 20 years, they're going to make it open sourced and provide builds for iOS, Mac and Linux...but not Windows which is one of the largest operating systems in the world? I'm guessing they really don't want it used everywhere. Though knowing Microsoft they'll take Swift and implement support for it in Visual Studio.

Because they are probably thinking more in terms of iOS and Android.

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#228

Post by wlesieutre »

notsony wrote: post #40
gtrubetskoy wrote: post #8

This places Swift right along Golang and Rust as the new interesting language.

Not really. Depends on whether or not Swift's standard libraries and core APIs are all open-sourced.

Don't most swift apps also still drop to Obj-C? That will make them less portable.

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#229

Post by carlosrg »

dmritard96 wrote: post #15

I will surely be downvoted for speaking so off the cuff, but I haven't really enjoyed swift so far. How has the general developer reception been to the language, not just with respect to obj-c, but also to java or any other turing complete language?

> I haven't really enjoyed swift so far

I haven't either, but I haven't used it a lot so I can't give a final verdict on it. But I'm the kind of person that enjoys C++ (well, especially after C++11, feels like a new language and I'm slowly becoming a C++ fanboy), and I guess all those new system languages like Swift and Rust are supposed to fill the void for people that don't like the existing system languages available, so maybe it's not for me.

Re: “Swift will be open source later this year”

#230

Post by zak_mc_kracken »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #221
bitmapbrother wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, all bets are off once Go becomes a first class citizen on Android.

This cannot happen soon enough. I'm not saying this because of anything to do with Apple's Swift announcement. I'm saying this because it'll be a huge benefit to Android.

> I'm saying this because it'll be a huge benefit to Android. reply

How so?

The language has a weaker type system than Java, doesn't support exceptions and requires error checking every other line, has very poor tool support (because the compiler was not designed with IDE's in mind).

Except maybe add a few developers who refused to write code on Android because of Java, I really don't see what Go would bring to Android.

Post reply on HN