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Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

swift.org

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Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#271

Post by Longhanks »

isodev wrote: post #206
easeout wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift announced Linux support in 2015 when it went open source. Aspects of parity have taken years, and the Objective-C interop that isn't relevant outside Apple platforms but made adoption take off at all occupied a lot of early effort, but every Swift talk at FOSDEM today was about embedded or Linux server applications, or platform-agnostic C++ and Java interop. What can you possibly mean by "Mac only" or "bare min…

Side note, I think it was hilarious that Swift was allowed on FOSDEM. Even “free” (as in you probably don’t have to pay for a developer account to use it, *unless you want to ship some binary), Swift remains an Apple product.

The Swift compiler, LLVM, Swift Standard Library, CoreDispatch, the Swift Package Manager and the Swift LLDB debugger are all FOSS and allow you to compile, debug, deploy, sell, buy and ship any binary you want under the terms of the Apache License 2.0.

Deployment of any software (unrelated to Swift) on Apple's platforms is entirely unrelated (and even then, at least on macOS you and any other user can install, sell, buy (...) any binary as desired).

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#272

Post by Longhanks »

flohofwoe wrote: post #268
tombert wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it dying? I think it's still pretty popular for app development isn't it? I was pretty excited to hear that Ladybird is doing a lot of stuff in Swift, because I think it's a pretty decent and fast language and I think it'd be pretty neat to see a browser written in it.

It's essentially "Big in Japan" (eg on Apple platforms but nowhere else). Even on Apple platforms I winder if ObjC is actually still more popular ;)

Well if you wonder you should conduct some simple research, but be prepared to have your opinion challenged. Swift ist doing very fine and much more popular than ObjC (again, if you don't believe it, invest 5 minutes into research).

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#273

Post by aristofun »

fastball wrote: post #193
aristofun wrote: post #177

Swift itself is a great piece of tech. But it is doomed to fail as a general widely adopted language unless apple makes few critical moves including open sourcing everything including XCode, providing support for 3d party IDE developers (because xcode is terrible), creating decent package manager, adopting testing as first class citizen etc. There is just no economical sense for anyone to invest in swift until all th…

Your wishlist seems midly contradictory. Why does Apple need to open-source XCode if they also provide support for 3rd party IDEs (which they already do, btw)? Also what do you not like about cocoapods for package management? Plenty of people make an incredible amount of money building apps in Swift, so your last sentence is just wrong.

Decent support for 3d party IDE would mean open sourcing all critical xcode parts that currently leave developers no choice.

Cocoapods is too old and bad for modern era package management. It’s not made for swift also.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#274

Post by talldayo »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #252
isodev wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side note, I think it was hilarious that Swift was allowed on FOSDEM. Even “free” (as in you probably don’t have to pay for a developer account to use it, *unless you want to ship some binary), Swift remains an Apple product.

You don't need an Apple developer account for Swift on server, Windows and Linux. You need one only to ship apps on Apple platforms, but that's unrelated to Swift. It applies also to apps written in Objective-C, C/C++, and multi-platform language/frameworks like Dart/Flutter.

I think the bigger insult towards the Open Source community is their refusal to publish Free Software on the App Store.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#276

Post by easeout »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #250
TheNightman wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I jumped into swift on Linux a while back having mostly used it on apple platforms and I couldn’t even tell anything was different. A few years ago I would’ve had to struggle with SwiftNIO but not nowadays. URLSession, Codable, etc. all there on Linux (not sure about Combine but Combine is stupid in the Swift 6 world IMO. Swift concurrency is better in almost every way). Swift on Linux (except NixOS) is actually…

I also have a dim view of Combine and Swift's shitty observation regime, but what does its concurrency have to do with it?

Swift Concurrency as a feature set includes async/await and async for, which solve a large part of Combine's same problem with better safety and less setup/teardown. These days Combine is still useful, specifically for multiple observers and several cases of adapting to older event publishing sources.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#277

Post by mdhb »

desiderantes wrote: post #126
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can only speak for myself, but I’d love to be able to use Swift elsewhere so I don’t need to drag around a JVM and all the things that come with it (Kotlin) or have to wrestle with Rust’s sematics and disinclination towards old style imperative desktop UI development. Swift isn't perfect of course, but it’s the closest I’ve come to a language feeling “comfy”.

So you haven't heard of Kotlin Multiplatform.

Or Dart

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#278

Post by jayd16 »

pjmlp wrote: post #265
jayd16 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your point? That's what Apple makes available. I'd use the C# API if that's how they provided it. If not dominating the games on those plarforms, Unity and C# have a strong footing to say the least. Swift doesn't seem to be making very much headway on platforms where APIs are available in anything else. Maybe that can chance. It seems like a neat language but "it's popular because apple forces you to use it" i…

The point is that they are guest languages on Apple ecosystem and need Apple tooling and languages as means being available. I may also add that I dislike Microsoft doesn't give to the .NET ecosystem the same care for games developers as Apple does for Swift and existing OS SDKs. As far as DirectX team is concerned, only C++ exists, and .NET team lets third party folks do the needful. Had it not been for MonoGame, Un…

The specifics of C# are fairly irrelevant. Point is that even if swift is forced, middleware can and will just plaster over that. Even if Metal is forced, tools can plaster over that.

Apple forcing an API is not enough to sustain a language's popularity.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#279

Post by pjmlp »

jayd16 wrote: post #278
pjmlp wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that they are guest languages on Apple ecosystem and need Apple tooling and languages as means being available. I may also add that I dislike Microsoft doesn't give to the .NET ecosystem the same care for games developers as Apple does for Swift and existing OS SDKs. As far as DirectX team is concerned, only C++ exists, and .NET team lets third party folks do the needful. Had it not been for MonoGame, Un…

The specifics of C# are fairly irrelevant. Point is that even if swift is forced, middleware can and will just plaster over that. Even if Metal is forced, tools can plaster over that. Apple forcing an API is not enough to sustain a language's popularity.

When the language is required for one of two mobile ecosystems, and second major desktop ecosystem, popularity is relative.

For decades C# was only relevant on Windows, outside Unity never got wide adoption among AAA studios after Unreal became free, and after their license debacle less so, Godot favors C++ and GDScript even with C# support it isn't what most folks reach for, and Microsoft keeps having an adoption (popularity) problem on UNIX culture oriented startups.

While just like Swift on Apple's ecosystem, C# is doing just fine on Microsoft culture environments.

Popularity is relative.

Re: Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

#280

Post by caspper69 »

tamlin wrote: post #257
caspper69 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rotor was BSD licensed, so I suppose if that’s your definition of a not very open license…

Rotor had it's own license: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Common_Language_... I have various snapshots of the Rotor 1 and 2 sources around and they have the SSCLI license. There is a file that contains BSD licensed code (pal\rotor_pal.h).

Thank you for the follow up. You know after I posted that my thought was am I mistaking their BSD release for a BSD license, and of course I was. The memory isn’t what it used to be.
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