Live data from Hacker News

“Swift will be open source later this year”

apple.com

81–90 of 573 posts

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

#82

Ah, interesting. I've suddenly gone from "Not caring at all about the existence of this language" to "Mildly intrigued." It's amazing what some opening of control will do.

I'm hopeful but until I see a license and what is and isn't opened sourced I'm going to be reserved.

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

#83

> Swift will be open source later this year, available for iOS, OS X, and Linux. They're doing Linux but not Windows? Is Windows not sufficiently important or maybe they just forgot to include Windows in the announcement?

Maybe it is just because WINAPI is different from *nix.

That's a good point. It was probably easier to port it to Linux. I can't see why they would intentionally avoid Microsoft (at least not at this point in their history).

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

#84

> Swift will be open source later this year, available for iOS, OS X, and Linux. They're doing Linux but not Windows? Is Windows not sufficiently important or maybe they just forgot to include Windows in the announcement?

It's perhaps because Linux is (almost) POSIX compliant, but Windows is not? It would make porting to Linux far more easier than to Windows.

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

#85
post #35
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as HN comments go, this one sets a pretty low bar. Is there even one doubt that this will happen? If not, the pedantic distinction between "announce they intend to" and "doing it" is extremely worthless...

Apple also said they would make FaceTime an open and interoperable protocol "later this year". So being sceptical of Apple's promises of openness are justified.

For the nth time, this wold put on hold after a patent dispute.

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

#87

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?

Swift's popularity has undergone a meteoric rise for a young language according to TIOBE [http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....]

But that's not surprising given its ecosystem; as others have mentioned, language success has less to do about its theoretical benefits and more to do about what environments it allows the developer access to. Javascript is the case-in-point; I think few people would argue it is a well-designed language, but if you want to do web development, you're going to need at least a basic understanding of it, so it maintains brutal popularity.

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

#88
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple also said they would make FaceTime an open and interoperable protocol "later this year". So being sceptical of Apple's promises of openness are justified.

it's only June.

By "later this year" he means the year that FaceTime was first introduced (2010).

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

#89
Aside from graphics/GUI programming; there is little advantage to Objective C or Swift.

The "language" may be "open sourced"; but will the important Cocoa implementations be open sourced?

It shouldn't be to too tough to re-implement Swift; unless Apples starting suing people for doing it.

The exact meaning of Apples announcement needs some clarification.

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

#90
post #57
post #5

Well whaddaya know, I like the direction this is going with both Apple and Microsoft.

I'll second that when Apple and MS will support Vulkan on their OSes and open codecs in their browsers. Or to put it another way, when they'll stop using sickening lock-in to make life harder for everyone.

They support Unreal and Unity.

Much better than supporting an API that requires 600 LOC for drawing a triangle and isn't available anywhere besides the reference platforms.

Post reply on HN