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The Swift Programming Language

developer.apple.com

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Re: The Swift Programming Language

#261

Post by andrewtbham »

davidw wrote: post #217
munchor wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that Microsoft has been open sourcing so much stuff I was expecting Apple to follow the wave and release Swift as open source too. It's a shame though.

I'm old enough to remember Apple suing Microsoft for "copying their look and feel". Open source is something Apple only does strategically - when they have to or it suits them - it is not part of the company's ethos. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso... .

Yeh, I agree. I was surprised when they open sourced webkit. But like you said, it's strategic. I don't think they care that much about the browser. Their emphasis is on apps running in their ecosystem.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#263

Post by arasmussen »

munificent wrote: post #225
arasmussen wrote: post #95

Feels like they looked at a bunch of programming languages, took all their favorite features, and then put them into one which still sits on top of the ObjC runtime. And then added some Apple syntactic craziness. For example: var apples = 3; // mutable let oranges = 5; // immutable let summary = "I have \(apples) apples and \(oranges) oranges";

You say "Apple syntactic craziness", but "var" is identical to JS, et. al. and "let" is identical to ML, et. al. The string interpolation syntax is unique, but kind of makes since given then \ is the escape character in C strings.

var and let were referring to ripping off other languages and the syntax you pointed out as unique is the syntactic craziness.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#265

Post by a_c_s »

varenc wrote: post #93

It seems like the only way to view the programming language documentation is on iBooks on an iOS device? For a programming book, this is ridiculous. Edit: The latest version of OS X does support iBooks. Lets hope you have that.

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/reference...

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#266

Post by tenken »

United857 wrote: post #200
kcorbitt wrote: post #146

So it looks like the language isn't open source and won't target non-Apple runtimes? I'm not trying to troll, I just think that it's a pity that Apple tends to limit the ecosystem and applications of its otherwise-great languages. Building against LLVM ought to make it fairly trivial to make this cross-platform.

Is there anything to stop a independent implementation? Like C#/.Net and Mono?

horrible adoption?

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#269

Post by stock_toaster »

arasmussen wrote: post #95

Feels like they looked at a bunch of programming languages, took all their favorite features, and then put them into one which still sits on top of the ObjC runtime. And then added some Apple syntactic craziness. For example: var apples = 3; // mutable let oranges = 5; // immutable let summary = "I have \(apples) apples and \(oranges) oranges";

A quick scan of the ebook has a pretty nice looking collection of stuff: option type, generics, protocols, etc.

A bit of python looking stuff and some ruby looking stuff in there too. I am intrigued enough to give it a try when it is available.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#270

Post by stcredzero »

rayiner wrote: post #205
stcredzero wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift doesn't seem to have anything to do with the parallel language at swift-lang.org. Whoops. Should've corrected that when I copied the comment over. In any case, reference counting is disastrous for the parallelism story. GC thread coming along and causing an additional cache miss is way better than having to do atomic operations on reference counts all the time. Why are atomic reference counts necessary? You wou…

Swift is based on the ObjC runtime, which means you have a shared heal and the possibility of multiple threads adjusting counts at the same time.

Yes, but with something CSP-derived, you could design a runtime where you're covered if you use the concurrency facilities correctly, and you're SOL if you don't. Then only the concurrency primitives need atomic refcounts.
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