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Skip is now free and open source

skip.dev

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Re: Skip is now free and open source

#81

Post by yencabulator »

nsm wrote: post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

The fewer proprietary abandonwares are in my dependencies the more I can actually do things. It's less about the price and more about the freedom.

From the link:

> Beyond pricing, there’s a deeper concern about durability. Developers are understandably wary of building their entire app strategy on a small company’s paid, closed-source tool.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#82

Post by nsm »

yencabulator wrote: post #81
nsm wrote: post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

The fewer proprietary abandonwares are in my dependencies the more I can actually do things. It's less about the price and more about the freedom. From the link: > Beyond pricing, there’s a deeper concern about durability. Developers are understandably wary of building their entire app strategy on a small company’s paid, closed-source tool.

Would you pay for source-available products? GPL and paid license?

Along with a guarantee that you get to keep access to older versions (Jetbrains and Sublime Text models)?

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#83

Post by [deleted] »

nsm wrote: post #82
yencabulator wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fewer proprietary abandonwares are in my dependencies the more I can actually do things. It's less about the price and more about the freedom. From the link: > Beyond pricing, there’s a deeper concern about durability. Developers are understandably wary of building their entire app strategy on a small company’s paid, closed-source tool.

Would you pay for source-available products? GPL and paid license? Along with a guarantee that you get to keep access to older versions (Jetbrains and Sublime Text models)?

[deleted]

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#84

Post by nsm »

thisislife2 wrote: post #76
nsm wrote: post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

But, as the article points out, developers do pay for the tools indirectly - "First-party IDEs like Xcode and Android Studio, popular integration frameworks, and essential dev tools are all given away at no (direct) cost. The platform vendors monetize through developer program fees, app store commissions, and cloud services. Framework providers typically monetize through complementary services." And note that the art…

This is only true for a subset of software like mobile apps. Web developers are not paying for anything except compute.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#85

Post by wahnfrieden »

hn-acct wrote: post #73
wahnfrieden wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biggest downside to SwiftUI development is lack of hot reloading. You can use the Inject framework but it’s fragile. This also makes it harder to iterate on with agents.

Small views and the preview canvas are your friend

Preview canvas is unusable by agents.

Small views don't solve this for human use either. The only solutions for fast builds are to stop using SPM and also to adopt the "microfeatures" pattern with interface stubs and dependency injection so that very little must be rebuilt/linked. This is a huge change for many projects and carries ongoing development maintenance overhead so it is not a trivial decision to make.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#86

Post by bossyTeacher »

fn-mote wrote: post #26
publicdebates wrote: post #16

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. I've run into this too with my own app. I thought people would like a Lua GUI framework that's professional grade and gives you full access to WinAPI via Lua. I was using DragonRuby as my model. So I wasted a thousand hours making the app and its documentation. Turns out, even after people understood what it was (I suck at marketing), ever…

> What's the point? Marketing for my skills as a developer? There's no more need for software consultants now with Copilot/etc. I have to change careers. I encourage you to find a way out of this belief, or at least least fend it off as long as possible. You can see from recent HN postings that most people are not experiencing career-ending levels of performance from LLMs.

>most people are not experiencing career-ending levels of performance from LLMs.

You don't have to. Experiencing increased competition for jobs or lower pay for the same job (because less devs are needed for the same level of output) is just as bad.

Experiencing increased competition for jobs or lower pay for the same job (because the AI industry imploded and the devs from that industry are now in the market) is just as bad.

The rise of companies you might end up where some/most the codebase or db schemas were vibe generated is just as bad. LLMs are the new VB6. At least, with VB6 the initial complexity of the apps would be limited by how much the cowboy coder could handle (ie. not infinite). With LLMs that limit is an order of magnitude higher. I expect many of the future legacy apps to be dangerous jungles of vibes many contractors will be urgently hired to immediately fix when things begin behaving weirdly and the causes of the issue are hidden somewhere in the jungle.

Any of the above is bad enough on its own, let alone combined. I strongly believe two of the above will happen within the next 5 years.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#87

Post by wiseowise »

marcprux wrote: post #37
kwanbix wrote: post #21

I just started to learn Kotlin, how does it compare with Kotlin Multi Platform for those that used both?

Good question. I'll try to answer as objectively as possible, despite my bias towards Skip's approach. Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) enables you to target different platforms with your Kotlin. In the context of mobile apps, it allows you to compile your Kotlin to a native framework for iOS, so you can reuse your business logic. On iOS, the Kotlin is running in its own little garbage-collected runtime, but it sets up a b…

> KMP itself doesn't have an equivalent

Are you sure about that?

https://code.cash.app/native-ui-and-multiplatform-compose-wi...

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#88

Post by holoduke »

marcprux wrote: post #44
agentifysh wrote: post #34

This is a welcome addition but why should Flutter devs use this ? Seems like it requires 32gb of ram! Also Flutter is already very mature and can produce not only near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) but can target desktop and even web applications. I do wonder how much of a boost skip offers vs Flutter's mobile apps. Will give skip a try when dram prices normalize.

See my response below on the KMP question: the comparison with CMP mostly applies to Flutter as well. > near-native mobile apps (the difference is almost negligible) Not as of the advent of Liquid Glass on iOS (and, to a lesser extent, Material Expressive on Android). Flutter isn't going to be implementing these new interface conventions[1], and so the UI for these apps are stuck on the last generation and are alread…

Well sorry. But Android UI is bad just bad. The settings, the menus. Its bloated and almost as if they deliberately made it annoying to use. It just sucks.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#89

Post by cornstalks »

nsm wrote: post #82
yencabulator wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fewer proprietary abandonwares are in my dependencies the more I can actually do things. It's less about the price and more about the freedom. From the link: > Beyond pricing, there’s a deeper concern about durability. Developers are understandably wary of building their entire app strategy on a small company’s paid, closed-source tool.

Would you pay for source-available products? GPL and paid license? Along with a guarantee that you get to keep access to older versions (Jetbrains and Sublime Text models)?

> Would you pay for source-available products? GPL and paid license?

I'm not GP but I would at least consider it. I say that as someone who refuses to build on closed-source tooling or libraries. I'd even consider closed-source if there was an irrevocable guarantee that the source would be released in its entirety (with a favorable open source license) if the license/pricing terms ever changed or the company ceased to exist or stopped supporting that product.

> Along with a guarantee that you get to keep access to older versions (Jetbrains and Sublime Text models)?

I like that for personal tools but I wouldn't build my products or business on top of those. I've had too much trouble getting old binaries to work on new OS versions to consider these binaries to be usable in the long term.

Re: Skip is now free and open source

#90

Post by cortesoft »

nsm wrote: post #70

> The plain truth is that developers expect to get their tools free of charge. This is an accurate, but damning indictment of how some of the most highly paid workers on the planet won't pay for tools. Unlike nearly every other profession. Folks, if you can afford it, please pay for quality software, instead of relying on FAANG and VC money to keep the tools going!

That's because open source tools are way better for software developers.

I find quirks or bugs or limitations in my tools all the time, and when they are open source I can fix and augment the tools however I want, and I can share those changes with others.

I can't do that for closed source software.

Now, for most software users it doesn't really matter because they couldn't fix a bug or add a feature anyway. Closed and open source are functionally equivalent, and it makes more sense to pay for support and not care you can't change it yourself.

I think this is kind of like cars; people who work on cars want to buy a car that doesn't have a bunch of electronic and proprietary parts that can't be worked on in their garage. On the other hand, people who won't work on their car anyway don't care.

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