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“Swift will be open source later this year”

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

#251

Post by jokr004 »

chc wrote: post #199
jokr004 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is not a very interesting thing to gripe over.. there's nothing wrong with being excited about the announcement, why don't we stop with the pedantry?

There is nothing wrong with being excited about the announcement, but that 1) that isn't what the headline indicated (it's since been changed, but at the time it was something very close to "Apple has open-sourced Swift!"), and 2) the comment I was replying to said Apple had "done it," which seemed to be responding to the inaccurate headline. I think most people involved in software would realize that the distinction…

Surely any reasonable person would recognize that it looks like swift will be open sourced, barring something unexpected.. You're nitpicking at someones choice of words and not adding anything valuable to the conversation.

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

#252

Post by mozumder »

sjackso wrote: post #110
cpr wrote: post #11

Nice to see that Chris (Lattner) got his way. I chatted with him last WWDC right after the main Swift technical session, and he expressed the desire to open source it, but had no idea if he could get it through the powers that be. Supporting the standard libraries on Linux is certainly a surprise, though.

Supporting Linux is a surprise, but I think it's a great move on their part. Think: How many iOS apps are frontends to a server API? And how many of those APIs are running on Linux servers? Swift on Linux means ~all the code for a client-server iOS app can be written in the same language.

Apple needs to get the rest of OS X onto the server. They could build their own servers again (unlikely), or at least license OS X Server to Dell/HP/IBM/VMWare/etc..

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

#253

Post by threeseed »

nickysielicki wrote: post #161
cpr wrote: post #11

Nice to see that Chris (Lattner) got his way. I chatted with him last WWDC right after the main Swift technical session, and he expressed the desire to open source it, but had no idea if he could get it through the powers that be. Supporting the standard libraries on Linux is certainly a surprise, though.

Too little too late. Apple could have got my attention if they had done this from the start, but at this point I find it hard to get excited about this. Half the reason I find myself drawn to a new language is the culture and community surrounding it. You might think this seems silly at first glance, they're programming languages, not fraternities. But hear me out. Golang is a pragmatic crowd. Go into #go-nuts on fre…

Golang is a pragmatic crowd ? Weird because it seems like an ideologically driven language.

Their attitude towards exception handling and generics has never strike me as being overly pragmatic.

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

#254

Post by fixermark »

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #236
fixermark wrote: post #71

Ah, interesting. I've suddenly gone from "Not caring at all about the existence of this language" to "Mildly intrigued." It's amazing what some opening of control will do.

There is no opening of control, just opening of source. You can be sure Apple will remain the exclusive ruler of what goes into Swift.

I don't doubt it. But as Iceweasel reminds us, with opening of source, dissent is just a fork away.

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

#255

Post by chc »

jokr004 wrote: post #251
chc wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing wrong with being excited about the announcement, but that 1) that isn't what the headline indicated (it's since been changed, but at the time it was something very close to "Apple has open-sourced Swift!"), and 2) the comment I was replying to said Apple had "done it," which seemed to be responding to the inaccurate headline. I think most people involved in software would realize that the distinction…

Surely any reasonable person would recognize that it looks like swift will be open sourced, barring something unexpected.. You're nitpicking at someones choice of words and not adding anything valuable to the conversation.

I sincerely do not think "They pulled it off" versus "It looks like they will do this sometime in the next six months" is nitpicking somebody's choice of words. The difference between the two is not a minor nuance, it's a large practical difference, and I don't think people would necessarily understand the latter meaning from the former.

When I first saw this thread, I certainly thought Apple had actually open-sourced Swift, as both the headline and the comment I was replying to said so. Then I looked at the linked page and saw it had not happened, so I corrected this materially important piece of information.

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

#256

Post by codesushi42 »

markque wrote: post #222

Does swift have a good package manager/library ecosystem? I think any new language should have this from the start.

No. The closest thing is Cocoapods, which is great. But as the name implies, it's meant for Cocoa compatible libraries.

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

#257

Post by david-given »

astrodust wrote: post #203
lukeh wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be interesting to see if they support @objc on Linux, the Apple runtime is difficult to support because it requires the dynamic linker to notify libobjc when an image is loaded.

The Objective-C support on Linux is already great, the compiler handles it well. The problem is the Foundation library isn't ported so you're left using old, unsupported relics from the OpenSTEP project.

Is Apple's dialect supported, or only the NeXT version? (Which, TBF, has absolutely nothing wrong with it and is a great language; but it's not what people are writing these days.)

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

#258

Post by lobster_johnson »

pjungwir wrote: post #145
sjackso wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supporting Linux is a surprise, but I think it's a great move on their part. Think: How many iOS apps are frontends to a server API? And how many of those APIs are running on Linux servers? Swift on Linux means ~all the code for a client-server iOS app can be written in the same language.

I've been wondering for a while now why no one builds an Obj C backend for their apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9500855 Being able to deploy on Linux might be what it takes!

I long dreamed of using Objective C to build server apps. The compiler support has been there for years (GCC, later Clang), but there's no standard library. All the stuff you would want from Foundation is missing; strings, sockets, file I/O, encoding support, threads, etc., it turns out you'd have to reimplement a lot from scratch. There's GNUstep, but last I looked it, it was stagnant, and also very much geared towards GUI apps.

Swift on the backend would be even better, I think. Between all the languages that have evolved lately (including Go and Rust), Swift has struck me as the one that feels the most like my ideal language.

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

#259

Post by nvbn »

coldtea wrote: post #176
nickysielicki wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too little too late. Apple could have got my attention if they had done this from the start, but at this point I find it hard to get excited about this. Half the reason I find myself drawn to a new language is the culture and community surrounding it. You might think this seems silly at first glance, they're programming languages, not fraternities. But hear me out. Golang is a pragmatic crowd. Go into #go-nuts on fre…

> Too little too late. Apple could have got my attention if they had done this from the start, but at this point I find it hard to get excited about this. That's just like your opinion man. If Swift is Open Source it's gonna be a huge thing, for two reasons: (a) it already attracts millions of developers because it's the suggested language to develop iOS apps in, and (b) it's a nice modern language that plays in a ve…

Have you tried Go, Scala or Rust? All of those language are from their separate leagues, how can you compare swift with them?

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

#260

Post by chimeracoder »

threeseed wrote: post #200
ajross wrote: post #10

To be clear: Apple promises they will open source Swift "later this year". There's no source yet.

Apple has a precedent for open source technologies like this. And let's be honest Swift is great and all but it's hardly the crown jewels of the company they are giving away.

> Apple has a precedent for open source technologies like this.

They also have a precedent for being less than friendly towards FOSS[0][1][2][3], despite the way they try to present themselves otherwise by listing their open source contributions prominently.

Note that the author of these comments, saurik, is Jay Freeman, the creator of Cydia. Key quotes include:

> Apple has simply never been in compliance with the LGPL [for WebCore].

> As for Oracle, I think Apple is much more harmful [to open source]

> I have gotten so used to Apple giving open source the finger, and thereby have backup plans involving disassembles for most of the things I care about at this point, I had forgotten to even follow up on them failing to release anything

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2083953

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2523784

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9377345

[3] http://www.saurik.com/id/4

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