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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”

#481

Post by 72deluxe »

VikingCoder wrote: post #424
parasubvert wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Web is winning." If you mean "everything but HTML-based web sites", that's accurate. If you mean the actual Web sites, I really don't see it. The Web is huge, so isn't exactly dying, but it certainly isn't winning. Native mobile is "winning", in terms of being usually a far superior UX, and by sheer numerical demand. Native still often (thankfully) uses architectural elements of the web (URIs and HTTP) and the UX of…

> Native mobile is "winning", in terms of being usually a far superior UX, and by sheer numerical demand. Yeah? I could type a URL to anything here, and you could view it. If instead hide my content behind an app, I can't deep link to it. The likelihood of you installing the app to see the content is way lower. You need space on your mobile device to install my app. Potentially a password entered to install it. It ne…

It depends what the app is for. If it's for viewing content over HTTP then yes a native app probably is a dumb idea (unless the platform has wildly different browser capabilities, like on Android - you never know what you're going to get so have to write a dumb website).

However, if the app is for something useful (and not just a content viewer) then native is far superior.

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

#482

Post by Manishearth »

Dewie3 wrote: post #472
Manishearth wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[I'm a Rust user, and not particularly fond of Go, but...] Not having great static typing doesn't make it not pragmatic. Given Go's purpose, it is extremely pragmatic. One of the reasons Google uses Go is because their employees are often fresh out of college and might not be familiar with the depths of type systems. If you look at most professional Java/C++ code (starting to see this with Rust too), the features of…

Though there might be much to say about the different implementations of generics , I've found them to be easy to understand and use in languages. No type theory required. That has been more like "Oh, so that's the name for that thing/aspect, neat". If I don't have a problem with that, those coveted master race Google developers should have absolutely no problem with it.

It's not that generics are hard to grok, it's that they get used in a hard to grok way. Wrapping your head around such things gets more and more hard as the app complexity grows.

The base point is that languages like Go let you think of the program at runtime, only. Types are a runtime concept, everything is a runtime concept. Structuring APIs to use compile time safety requires a whole other kind of thinking, one which they may not expect to be uniformly available.

Ultimately it's a choice of whether or not you want to the programmer to think of data and flow (runtime), or metadata (types, compile time). Once you're used to both the difference is blurred. For newbies, the concept of using compile time safety can be daunting.

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

#483

Post by 72deluxe »

kibibu wrote: post #456
weavie wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux support.

GCC has supported Objective-C since at least version 2.0, released in 1992 (based on http://www.informatica.co.cr/linux/research/1992/0222.htm )

This is very very true. I remember trying to look into Objective C years and years ago and trying to get somewhere on my Linux box but due to the lack of standard GUI libraries etc. it seemed a non-starter.

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

#484

Post by pluma »

astrodust wrote: post #214
honest_joe wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open Source did not win. In fact it destroyed a lot of potential markets. With this move Apple is dragging more and more developers that would be interested in Go/ Java (aka Android world) to its net. This is a win for Apple only.

Another open source language and people just pile the hate on. Go is Google's language, Java is Oracle's, Rust is Mozilla's. Anything good for Go or Java is good for their respective companies, right? What do you want? Some language to arrive from outer space fully formed and license-free?

Python is the PSF's. PHP is Zend's/Facebook's. Ruby is ... Heroku's? JavaScript is... well, definitely not Mozilla's anymore...

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

#485

Post by 72deluxe »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #221
bitmapbrother wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, all bets are off once Go becomes a first class citizen on Android.

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.

Unless all those devs with apps on Android want to port all their code?

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

#486

Post by 72deluxe »

dmacvicar wrote: post #452
aikah wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Golang is a pragmatic crowd Why do people keep on saying that? Would people say javascript is for the pragmatic crowd because jsfiddle exists ? no Go is a badly designed language period. the type system forces devs to write runtime type assertions which should be the job of the compiler thanks to parametric types, if go designers knew one or 2 things about types. The fact that Go dismisses 30+ years of type theory…

I had the same opinion as you until I started some code with it. The true is that I had never been so productive writing code. The friction from what is in your head and the code is almost 0. It is true that I ended writing a few functions that were there only because the lack of generics, the type system and other stuff being "built-in". But at the end, I think it was an order of magnitude less often than I was expe…

Your comment is interesting, it has made me want to look at the language, so thanks.

But I think that the "friction from what is in your head to code" probably betrays that you weren't settled in a previous language? I only say this because I have zero friction writing C++, and have to think mildly backwards when it comes to C# or Java, and definitely Objective-C. Even PHP is like simplified C++ to me, so I write everything like it is a dumbed-down dialect of C++.

I suppose it is just what some people find comfortable.

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

#487

Post by 72deluxe »

addandsubtract wrote: post #248
higherpurpose wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Apple saw that and decide to change its mind. Sometimes companies change their minds this way, like how Microsoft changed its mind on the banning of DVDs for Xbox, even though they never "officially" said they would do that before the announcement of the Xbox One, but it was strongly "rumored" they would do that. I'm sure that's what they intended, but the outrage was too big to let it be.

Apple is never going to send me a free MacBook Pro and Thunderbolt display. Never.

Could you send me one instead?

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

#488

Post by 72deluxe »

josteink wrote: post #217
abuzzooz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said it will happen by the end of 2015.

They said they would make facetime an open standard. Still waiting.

Let's hope this waiting has not caused your Facetime to be Faceache!

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

#489

Post by fleitz »

Tloewald wrote: post #341
fleitz wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's designed to give it hype, it's not a systems language. The first question you should ask for any systems language is how to I integrate assembler, when the answer is to use C / C++ then you know it's not a systems language. Also, how you can tell a language is a systems language, it has an operating system written in it used by a large user base. How do you layout a struct in Swift so that it's the exact size an…

To write an OS you simply need to be able to compile code that can be launched by a bootloader. That's it. You don't need explicit control over the layout of your data structures in memory. I'd hazard that the engineers at Apple are perfectly qualified to identify what is and isn't a "systems language" working for one of the few companies that has actually developed several from scratch (I am referring to A/UX, Mac O…

For some definition of OS sure, for something on par with Windows/OSX/Linux this is definitely not true.

Getting to the additional point of assembler, how does one make a syscall in swift?

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

#490

Post by pluma »

alkonaut wrote: post #283

Funny, for years people said Microsoft was Copying Apple. We'll never know but I can't help thinking that Microsofts recent push to open source dev tools and languages at least made this happen sooner than it would have. It's a great time to be a developer.

Also, MS was copying Apple was copying Linux. Except Apple usually added more polish and MS usually botched it up.
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