Apple Doesn't Know If Swift Will Be Open-Source Or Cross-Platform

[MartinN]

Phoronix: Apple Doesn't Know If Swift Will Be Open-Source Or Cross-Platform

At Apple's recent WWDC event besides announcing a new 3D graphics API, Apple also announced Swift, a new programming. However, Apple developers don't yet know -- or can't admit -- whether Swift will ultimately be open-source or made to be cross-platform...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTcxNzA

Mr Cook, et al, at the management heap of Apple - you only get to keep what you give away. This may sound really foreign, strange and weird... but it's got, let's just say a -modicum- of, truth to it...

[sindex]

Well, we still have assembly were it counts (more than 1% of the debian repos iirc), and the reason we try to remove further it is portability, not complexity.
The point can be more nuanced by saying that tools do not disappear because they are complex. C, C++, ADA are all languages difficult to master, but these difficulties exist to provide extended possibilities to the programmers, and mission critical/performance intensive programs are not going to disappear in the near future.

Absolutely, I was just replying to the troll. C# has a place just like C has a place and so has Swift. People had been complaining about Objective C for a long time and Apple delivered.

[Alderon]

Personally I believe we're seeing what has happened in the past already: vendors trying to monopolize a market by locking out every competitor. Then after some time a new competitor shows up who challenges the dominating company which ends up totally restructuring the whole market until another company owns the whole market and that goes on and on and on...
At the moment we're seeing that Microsoft isn't as strong anymore as they used to be and Apple and Google giving their best to lock users to their specific platforms.

From a developer's point I'm absolutely platform agnostic and prefer languages which are quite easy to port. This - however - isn't in the best interest of OS vendors, at least not as long as they CAN dominate the market (aka no strong competition in sight). Bottom line: I wouldn't be surprised to see more and more vendor lock in going on, no matter what company we're talking about.

[Drago]

could you elaborate what this has to do with go?

Yorgos is just a moron, don't respond to him. Go is wonderful language like no other else, and I use it with pleasure.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

well C++ isn't going anywhere any time soon and beside don't take apple keynote too seriously about Metal and Swift.

Metal: if you have followed A7 apple chips lately the first thing you think probably is how that massive chip is not super faster than an adreno GPU, you probably assumed was a hardware bug or massive bottlenecks but in perspective probably the reason is uber slow crappy OpenGL ES drivers(like most ARM drivers), so is not that metal is 10x faster than OpenGL ES, their driver implementation is

Swift: well in perspective here happens the same, probably their obj C compiler for iOS was crappy ported or was very inneficient so instead of fixing it they choose to create a new language and let LLVM do the heavy lifting and optimizations passes, probably it wont be faster than native C++ in Linux ARM but will be lot faster than their unoptimized objC existant tooling + vendor lock in + WoW effect.

In life, when one speculates in the truly absurd, it is best kept to a few drunk friends.

[brosis]

As a regular Linux user I must confess : I don't give a damn.
The explaination is quite simple. Python, OpenGL, Qt, GTK, tons of other libraries - work effortlessly on various platforms and are easy to port.

Real life .net - people write against it, and its really hard to make that cr$* work outside of M$.
Real life winapi - wine is subpar and a thing that should never ever be needed.
Real life directx - non-m$ are stuck with six year old interfaces.

You criticise libre software for lacking something and then you support crap that leads exactly to that.

[wizard69]

It seems these days everyone seems somehow obligated to come up with their own programming language. I must admit that I didn't like Objective-C syntax so maybe this one will be better.
Apple would be wise to make this open source and cross platform, even MS kinda of did that with C# via Mono. I guess it never really caught on outside of Windows development but still, it's even available on OS X as far as I know, should you want to use it.

Open sourcing the language would only be of value if it is documented publicly like C & C++ are. That is the language standard is managed via a standards body, with that standard freely available once you pay your fee to the standards body

You are right that C# never went far beyond MS. I'd call part of the problem the language itself but who would invest in a language controlled by Microsoft. In the end here Open Source means little if the evolution of the language remains in one set of hands.

[wizard69]

Total BS!

In the majority of cases, this behavior is intended to fulfill precisely ONE objective; generating vendor lock-in.

You have no evidence to defend that statement. Any rational person would have realized that Objective C is going no where fast and is a difficult or maybe better said tedious, environment within which to program for Apples devices. Apple knows this as do developers actually working on the platform

If you use standard languages and standard libraries, building your software for a different platform is trivial. If you use OS-vendor specific languages and OS-vendor specific libraries, building your software for a different platform becomes almost prohibitively complicated and expensive, or requires extremely ugly hacks (like wine, for example, which never EVER works even close to well enough).

If you are any sort of programmer you should realize there is a failure in your logic above. If you are about to target a platform by definition you will be using platform specific libraries

MS/C#/Mono are no different in this regard. They open source *some* of it, but only enough to trick developers into trusting them enough to actually use this. They (developers) then build against a whole bunch of MS-only libraries (because that is the only way to get things to *actually work*) and end up with software that is stuck to MS.

My impression of C# was basically that it sucked as a language, developers had little concern about a lock in because the vast majority where already locked to the platform via Visual C.

This is the ONLY reason that MS is still sales strong in desktop computers. So many people want to ditch MS for MANY reasons (usability, performance, security...), but have at least one PROGRAM that they need to use that won't work on anything besides MS. The vendor of that software surely would like to sell that customer a build for whatever OS they choose, but it is non-trivial to build it for that OS because they fell into the MS language trap.


*** I don't trust apple AT ALL. You shouldn't either.

I certainly wouldn't trust you based on your grasp of the evolution of MS. MS got into the position they where in because big business wanted a big business to deal with when it came to buying computing technology. I see remnants of this mentality even today, in the way IT professionals speak about certain technologies such as smart phones. Far to many are looking for the handholding, the contract that absolves them of all responsibility and anything non consumer.

[wizard69]

isnt this solving problems which Rust is already solving ? (and rust is completely FOSS, AFAIK)
So apart from apple fanbois, why would anyone choose this ?

Well obviously at the moment you wouldn't choose it if you programmed something other than an Apple device. For one thing the language isn't even complete yet.

But let's say Apple does open up the platform why would you support it? Here are a few reasons:

1. Real programmers don't live in their grandmothers basement, writing code on computer sitting on a plank held up with cinder blocks. Programmers, especially people writing compilers, have families to feed and cloth As such we know that Apple actually pays people decently so that they can take part in their communities, eat decently and give a little
2. LLVM, CLang and the rest have been extraordinarily well managed considering how far they have come in a few years As such if Swift is opened up would should expect the same sorts of get the job done management.
3. Like it or not the more programmers interested in a language the better. In fact strong interest can actually revive a language like Objective C. To put it bluntly Swift already has more interest in the community than Rust. The pay off in that interest is huge, libraries, training, blogs, sample code, and other goodies become available in large quantities So no matter your interests you will have it covered fairly quickly with Swift.
4. The language itself is rather interesting and appears to be well developed. It certainly has a ways to go refinement wise but if a similar open runtime was made available you would have an extremely powerful set of capabilities. Actually I think this is the bigger issue, releasing Swift itself would be fairly easy Here releasing means making available the language definition. What would be hard for Apple would be to release the run time which would amount to giving away the keys to the emerald city. Well parts of the runtime anyways.

I'm as convinced as anyone that opening up Swift would be huge for the industry and even for Apple. I doubt though that it will happen anytime soon. This simply due to its under heavy development nature.

[wizard69]

I absolutely agree every word of droidhacker.
Objective-C has already been the rule to Apple as C# to MS. They are open-standard, you can code with them on any platforms as long as the compiler was implemented, but once you want to make serious applications, you are out of choice but being stuck with specific vendor's OS.

I really believe people are trying to wrap reality here. Even if you are writing your code to POSIX standards you still are " locked " in to that standard. However most app developers realize that they aren't locked into Objecitve C on Mac OS any more than they want to be. It is extremely easy to bake in your C or C++ code. Beyond that your code isn't anymore vendors specific than any other solution Need a UI outside of Aqua and you end up with many solutions. Choose one and you are locked I into that solution!

The emerging of Swift is not that Apple is generously providing a great language that benefits anyone using any platforms, instead it is forging the prison for developers even more solid.

A prison from which you can make a substantial living

I don't think Apple is gonna open source Swift, even if it will it's trivial. If someone else implements an alternative, there might be a hell of a lot of lawsuits against it by Apple, just like what MS did to Mono.

If it is so trivial then do it! Take what Apple has released and build your own Swift envirnment if you think it is trivial.