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Introducing Phoenix, Swift set free

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Re: Introducing Phoenix, Swift set free

#41

Post by Igglyboo »

Karunamon wrote: post #12
k-mcgrady wrote: post #3

Aren't they probably just holding off on open sourcing it until...it's finished. I know they've just shipped '1.0' but I think they're still making pretty big changes.

Hard to say with Apple. Their record on openness and transparency isn't great. This would be akin to Microsoft open sourcing Visual Basic. Seeing Swift released would make my and a whole lot of other people's days, but honestly? I wouldn't hold my breath.

Apple open sources their OS X kernel (Darwin) along with many others things, that's a pretty good record and way more than Microsoft has ever done.

https://opensource.apple.com/

Re: Introducing Phoenix, Swift set free

#42

Post by listic »

achalkley wrote: post #9
ChuckMcM wrote: post #4

Interesting it seems to be more about building an open version of the iPhone called 'stratosphere' (see this https://source.ind.ie/project/ind-ie/blob/master/source/inde... ) Given that Apple went all patent troll on Google's Android licensees and patents, unlike copyrights, cannot be avoided by re-expression, I'm wondering about the strategy of making an open phone. Easily doable in 20 years (post patent expiration)…

I think "stratosphere" is the Cloud platform. The phone from AFAIK is Indie Phone.

I wish Indie Phone all the best, but... haven't OpenMoko http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko and Ubuntu Edge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edge shown that open source phones just don't fly? I surely wish they did.

Re: Introducing Phoenix, Swift set free

#43

Post by chc »

3JPLW wrote: post #40
chc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody at Apple has expressed any intention to make Swift free. Zero. Zip. You might call this "out of character," but the actual actions that they've taken in the real world have been to make Swift proprietary and turn away requests to open it up. Those are the facts, not a "boogeyman."

This is false. > "You can imagine that many of us want [Swift] to be open source and part of llvm, but the discussion hasn't happened yet, and won't for some time." - Chris Lattner, LLVMDev mailing list. http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-June/073698....

This is strange. You just quoted Chris Lattner saying Apple has no intention of making it open-source, but said it makes me wrong. Indeed, he confirmed that it hadn't even been considered at that time.

Re: Introducing Phoenix, Swift set free

#44

Post by salimmadjd »

Swift is a beautiful language but you want to keep it all to yourself. We don't know that's true or not. AFAIK, Apple has not officially commented on this topic.

Actually, having spoken with Swift team in Apple (rather not mention their names in case they get in trouble) on this topic, they seemed to be happy opening it up in general and opening it up as a general purpose language. Swift could ultimately replace C++ as the language of choice for game development and more.

That said, IMHO, the language will progress a lot faster initially if it's driven by a single master than to be pulled into many directions.

Re: Introducing Phoenix, Swift set free

#45

Post by joshstrange »

pjmlp wrote: post #25

I really don't get why people stress over this. Swift only has value with the Mac OS X and iOS ecosystems, specially as a mean to drag Objective-C developers into the FP world. There are so many open source languages in the ML family, a few of them are even used in the industry for several years now. Just go and join one of those projects. They will appreciate any help they can get.

> Swift only has value with the Mac OS X and iOS ecosystems

And .NET only had value in the MS world before Mono which very popular.

Re: Introducing Phoenix, Swift set free

#46

Post by jagger27 »

steve918 wrote: post #13

They should really come up with a better name. Phoenix is over used and even in open-source has a long history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox

Seriously. Unfortunately OpenSwift appears to be taken [0]. It would have been the obvious choice.

[0] http://sourceforge.net/projects/openswift/

Re: Introducing Phoenix, Swift set free

#47

Post by aral »

Hey folks, just wanted to say that it’s very early days at the moment (as WoodenChair commented) — and we’re changing the button to "Sneak Peek" to reflect this. Poor Greg has been working his fingers off to get it ready (he’s pulled three all-nighters and that can’t be healthy so he’s been told in no uncertain terms to get some sleep now) and we should have a running compiler within the week.

If any of you want to help out, please do get in touch.

Ideally, of course, if Apple opens Swift up, we can contribute to that instead of duplicating effort :)

Re: Introducing Phoenix, Swift set free

#49

Post by Dewie »

pjmlp wrote: post #25

I really don't get why people stress over this. Swift only has value with the Mac OS X and iOS ecosystems, specially as a mean to drag Objective-C developers into the FP world. There are so many open source languages in the ML family, a few of them are even used in the industry for several years now. Just go and join one of those projects. They will appreciate any help they can get.

I would be curious to know if the authors of this feels that there is something that Swift can give them that some other ML-like or whatever language can't, if we disregard any ties to the Apple platform and ecosystem.

Re: Introducing Phoenix, Swift set free

#50

Post by chc »

mikeash wrote: post #33
Karunamon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welp. When I did some cursory googling for "visual basic open source", that page wasn't anywhere on my results. Now I feel like a fool. I'd still be very surprised if Swift got the same treatment. It just doesn't seem like a very Apple-ey thing to do.

Apple has historically been pretty open at this level. Open sourcing, say, UIKit would be a shocking move on their part, but I'd argue that not eventually open-sourcing the Swift compiler would be equally shocking. For example, they've kept their LLVM contributions open source even though they wouldn't have to, they developed clang in the open, they released their ARM64 LLVM backend, and they've open sourced various…

How many years have to go by without Apple even talking about open-sourcing Swift before you consider it unlikely?
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