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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”

#271

Post by jophde »

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #230
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Andro…

You shouldn't be getting down-voted. The idea of anyone rewriting the entire Android Framework in Go when you can use better languages like Kotlin, Scala, Groovy, Clojure is asinine. Go will compile to Android architectures so you could do shared code in Go between iOS and Android like a C++ lib. That makes sense.

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

#272

Post by coldtea »

djur wrote: post #226
coldtea wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First, you said with first class support from the vendor. Linux doesn't offer that for any language.

Second, that's not an app development platform. Gnome has C (and it's own unholy stack on top), KDE has C++.

You can code for OS X/iOS in all kinds of languages too, if you mean at the OS and not at the app development level.

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

#273

Post by JustSomeNobody »

jophde wrote: post #271
zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Andro…

You shouldn't be getting down-voted. The idea of anyone rewriting the entire Android Framework in Go when you can use better languages like Kotlin, Scala, Groovy, Clojure is asinine. Go will compile to Android architectures so you could do shared code in Go between iOS and Android like a C++ lib. That makes sense.

Did anyone say anything about rewriting the entire Android Framework? Nope. It was about Go becoming a first class citizen on Android. That doesn't mean it can coexist with Java for someone who needs a fancy IDE.

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

#274

Post by [deleted] »

jophde wrote: post #268
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…

Why would I ever care about Go for Android when I can write apps in Kotlin? Kotlin is fully interoperable with Java. I don't have much experience with Swift but Kotlin is so nice. It has the best features from numerous languages such as Ruby. C#, etc. It's being made by Jetbrains who makes the the core of Android Studio so it will have support. Kotlin is also nearly as fast at runtime as Java with a tiny 200kb runtim…

[deleted]

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

#275

Post by dvanduzer »

charlesdm wrote: post #37
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?

What I personally dislike about Swift is the change in mental context when dealing with the combination of C/C++ and Swift code. Plenty of nontrivial apps use significant amounts of C and/or C++ libraries in some way. The switch when dealing with a combination of C/C++ and Objective-C source was not really a problem. But trying to interface a C++ library into a Swift application is less than a fun experience. Persona…

Do you have any notes on this experience posted somewhere publicly? I'd love to see an overview of the issues between Swift and C++ libraries. (Boost? Not Boost? The nuances of Swift's type system?)

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

#276

Post by jokr004 »

chc wrote: post #255
jokr004 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-source…

The headline and the direct quote from apples website say "Swift will be open source later this year".. I don't think anyone in this thread is trying to say anything to the contrary. Certainly the decision to open source swift has been "pulled off", perhaps that's what LesZedCB was referring to.. who knows? Who bloody cares? It's very much not important.

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

#277

Post by chc »

jokr004 wrote: post #276
chc wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-source…

The headline and the direct quote from apples website say "Swift will be open source later this year ".. I don't think anyone in this thread is trying to say anything to the contrary. Certainly the decision to open source swift has been "pulled off", perhaps that's what LesZedCB was referring to.. who knows? Who bloody cares? It's very much not important.

As I already said, that was not the title when I posted my comment. At the time it was something very much like "Swift is now open-source!" Because of worthless nit-picks like mine, the title was later changed to be accurate.

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

#278

Post by htns »

kh_hk wrote: post #249
rhodysurf wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Swift is a language and Qt is GUI framework

QML is akin to swift. Let's say, QML is to Qt as Swift is to Obj-C + native GUI libraries. The purpose and syntax of QML and Swift are similar, too. PS: Qt is not only a GUI framework. It's a cross platform C++ framework.

QML is a declarative UI markup language with javascript scripting. Are there really any parallels to Swift? I haven't looked at it in any detail before.

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

#279

Post by jophde »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #273
jophde wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't be getting down-voted. The idea of anyone rewriting the entire Android Framework in Go when you can use better languages like Kotlin, Scala, Groovy, Clojure is asinine. Go will compile to Android architectures so you could do shared code in Go between iOS and Android like a C++ lib. That makes sense.

Did anyone say anything about rewriting the entire Android Framework? Nope. It was about Go becoming a first class citizen on Android. That doesn't mean it can coexist with Java for someone who needs a fancy IDE.

It already IS. You can compile Android NDK libraries with Go today. It isn't that useful because the NDK isn't hooked up with the Android framework which means you don't get lifecycle events. There was a whole Android framework written over the past decade or so in Java that abstracts this.

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

#280

Post by alkonaut »

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.

It's great news. Hopefully there will be a node-like ecosystem for writing small services on Linux soon. With F#, Swift and C# available, hopefully the proliferation of Javascript can be slowed on the server (without people running to Go).
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