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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”

#401

Post by ratfacemcgee »

kristopolous wrote: post #333
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.

The fact that I don't use OSX has been a barrier to getting better at iOS development. Hackintoshing has proven to be quite elusive and the vmware and vbox USB layers in Linux don't convince virtualized OSX enough to transfer over apps to my iDevices. I'm not convinced you can get to high quality by testing strictly on emulators. If anyone has an old mac that can run modern xCode (you probably know what this constitu…

Xcode is written Xcode, not xCode. Thank you and good night. ps. if you have any friends who work in Apple retail, twice a year or so they have a big clear out of some of the internal use machines. You can pick up fairly good machines for very very cheap. They had 2009 white MacBooks for 170 bucks or so the last time.

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

#404

Post by MCRed »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #258
pjungwir wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 towa…

The best Web development framework of all time was WebObjects, which started at NeXT. It was basically Cocoa for the web. It was wonderful. When Apple bought NeXT they continued it for awhile and ported it to Java to try and make it more cross platform. That didn't really take, as it was a commercial product and despite lowering the price dramatically many times and loosening the licensing restrictions this was the point at which open source solutions like Ruby on Rails, despite being terrible in comparison really started to take off because they were free.

There was a great community around WebObjects and it's a shame that Apple didn't open source it in a timely fashion-- they could have changed things quite a bit.

It is still used in heavy production- for instance the iTunes store is a WebObjects Application as is, I believe, the App Store.

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

#406

Post by MCRed »

nemothekid wrote: post #235
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…

OTOH There are 70k Go repos on GitHub vs 31k for Swift (vs ~5k for Rust) - https://github.com/search?l=go&q=stars%3A%3E-1&ref=searchres... - https://github.com/search?l=swift&q=stars%3A%3E-1&ref=search... - https://github.com/search?l=rust&q=stars%3A%3E-1&ref=searchr...

I think that doesn't support your hypothesis--- 31k in one year compared to 70k in 6 years implies a lot more momentum for swift than go.

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

#407

Post by MCRed »

nnethercote wrote: post #398
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. This is a toxic attitude. It suggests that if people don't get something right on the first try they shouldn't try to improve it. "Better late than never" is true in many cases, and this is one of them.

Also, Apple tends to figure out what they have and try to get it right before releasing it widely. They don't want to throw things out there and then cause a lot of forks and language wars. The idea that it should be open source from the beginning, or it's worthless, is kinda dogmatic. Apple knows that the most core technologies need to be open source, which is why Darwin is there, Webkit, etc. And which is why Apple's work on LLVM is open source, it's extensions to Objective-C and of course Swift.

Swift was always going to be open source, but Apple launches OS products differently-- it gets them to 1.0 so they are strong enough to stand on their own.

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

#408

Post by jordanthoms »

jophde wrote: post #345
myko wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There aren't even any plans to support lambdas and Java 8. https://android-review.googlesource.com/#/c/150214/ Looks like there is someone at Google working on lambda support.

Maybe but this won't ship until at least M so if you min SDK is even as new as KitKat it won't help you much. Kotlin gives you lambdas, named parameters, extension functions (like C#), data classes, first class null, and more today on all versions of Android.

I think that most of the Java 8 features will be implemented in Jack, the new compiler they are working on (which is likely why the current toolchain has not seen much improvements). Most of them shouldn't need bytecode level changes.

That said Kotlin looks awesome and I'll definitely be considering it for my next Android project.

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

#409

Post by nickysielicki »

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…

> it already attracts millions of developers because it's the suggested language to develop iOS apps in

Which I pointed out isn't always a good thing. You know how Rails kind of overshadows Ruby because so much use of Ruby is related to rails? Well I think swift will face the same exact fate. I'm not interested in developing iOS frontends or iOS backends in the language. I firmly believe Web will win, and I believe it's going to happen sooner than most people do.

And I firmly believe that Google, Apple, and Microsoft are scared shitless of that idea. Why do you guys think we've seen such a recent renaissance in programming language development and availability? From the years 2000 -> 2010, what did these companies put out? Microsoft had .NET, just as they have since the dawn of time. As far as I can google, it seems that Google put out absolutely nothing. Apple revived Objective-C. Absolutely no progression or innovation whatsoever.

Cut to the last 5 years. Microsoft is dabbling in functional programming in the form of F#...in spite of the fact that their developers are in enterprise and presumably have no interest in this voodoo functional programming. Just in these past few months, they released Visual Studio and .NET on Unix! Meanwhile Apple's making Swift, a language that is simple enough to be used by hipster Apple developers who make iOS apps but also complex enough to have some decent functional elements. Google develops Golang and Dart? They decided to go with Java for android, but now they're interested in spending money developing languages with names on them like Rob Pike and Ken Freakin' Thompson?

Ballmer has been quoted as calling linux "cancer". Now Microsoft is hosting linux VMs for cheap and paying people to develop tools for unix users. When apple launched the iPhone in 2007, they had only 8.1% of the PC market, and yet they opted to risk the success of the iPhone in exchange for maintaining a closed ecosystem and require iOS developers own a mac instead of providing development tools for Windows. Now, when that risk turns out to have paid off and they have a dedicated community of developers, they're suddenly deciding multiplatform support for Swift is important?

Web is winning.

What happens when we can make our apps with ReactJS and cut Google out of their android adsense money because it's just a webview? What happens when we can make our apps with ReactJS and suddenly the iPhone advantage is nil because every app is available on every device and they look exactly the same on every device? What happens when we interact with computers solely through the web and mobile, and Windows continues to lose PC marketshare and maintain their pathetic 2.5% with Windows Phone?

This is embrace, extend, extingush at it's purest. Microsoft wants you developing on their languages using their tools because they know that .NET isn't really licensed under free licenses, and since that means they control where applications run best, they hope they can outperform web and get developers on their platform. It's certainly a stretch, but they're scared.

Apple is operating on the same principle, but theirs is actually permissively licensed. It makes no difference, you can be sure that Swift will be most conveinent for iOS and OSX developers. It's a first class product for Apple devices, but they say they want the community to help them provide support for other devices? Have fun relying on that.

I don't have Google totally figured out. Their goal is probably to bring Golang to android. They're investing in providing a very unified Android experience enhanced strongly by the power of Google Now and their google services, just look at recent android releases. If I can write a backend in golang, host it on google services, and write the client side in go as well, it's a very attractive environment. To be honest, when it comes to Google, I have more faith that they can, sometimes, act altruistically. I don't think Go was an altruistic action, but look at how they give back to open source via GSoC. No one else does anything close. The only big name I think is better than Google is Mozilla.

Speaking of Mozilla, why do you think they're developing Rust and Servo, with lots of experimental rendering techniques? They're betting on web and at being the best at it.

TL;DR: They're giving you new languages and development environments because they are holding on for dear life, and I'm not willing to accept being charmed into closed development environments. The state of tech is a direct result of truly free software that is dictated by the community and the community only. Accept nothing less.

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

#410

Post by girvo »

aikah wrote: post #366
alkonaut wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels much too pragmatic for my taste. Exactly the kind of thing to come out of Google, to solve their type of problem (scalability, deployment are much more important than the code itself). Personally I don't have googles problems (few of us do!) and I really like a good type system, with algebraic types/pattern matching/generics

> It feels much too pragmatic for my taste It doesn't feels pragmatic at all. It relies on users to do the compiler's job(type assertions) , because "You dont need that with Go"TM ...

It feels "pragmatic" in that Go follows "YAGNI" almost to a fault. It makes the argument that repeating yourself can sometimes be a better choice than more abstraction to increase code clarity. Some disagree with that, which is why it's nice to see other languages taking on similar areas that Go tackles but with differing choices in that area.
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