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

[Daktyl198]

1. 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.

This is very true, and makes me kind of mad. Rust is such a wonderful language and I can't understand why it's so unpopular. Sure, pull out the "it's an unfinished language" all you want, but it gets closer and closer to a finished language every day. At this point, a lot of the breaking changes I see in "This Week in Rust" seem to just be moving old hack functions over to completed libraries and removing the old version: essentially just re-mapping functions to their finished counterparts.

So aside from that, what is there? Is it that Mozilla is involved? Did Google throw out a blog post somewhere claiming that Go is better than Rust for x and y reasons and people took away from it that Rust isn't worth looking at? I'm just so confused over this.

(Go is also an awesome language though, from what I've seen. As soon as Rust is finished, I hope to see >50% of future projects using either Go or Rust )

[wizard69]

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.

yep, they even work on a Mac!

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.

One has to find balance in life! You can not sustain an economy on free software and frankly you can't assure the types of innovation the world needs via free software Lets face it one of the biggest drivers of innovation is the thought of a payoff in the future. Free software greatly reduces the chances of such a thing happening.

As for finding balance there has to be a rational value to society to compel someone to make a piece of software free The simple examples are in the realms of Genome research. On a volunteered basis just about anything can be seen as a positive in the open source/free community but maybe not so positive in the commercial space. No commercial programmer wants his job to disappear because of open source.

[wizard69]

I really think many ware way too wrapped up in this right now to think clearly Swift exists because it leverages Apples existing infrastructure. In a literal sense it was probably easier for them to write a new compiler to support exciting libraries and run times than it would be to effectively build a new native infrastructure in another language

This is very true, and makes me kind of mad. Rust is such a wonderful language and I can't understand why it's so unpopular. Sure, pull out the "it's an unfinished language" all you want, but it gets closer and closer to a finished language every day. At this point, a lot of the breaking changes I see in "This Week in Rust" seem to just be moving old hack functions over to completed libraries and removing the old version: essentially just re-mapping functions to their finished counterparts.

Remeber most people involved in programming are so involved to earn a buck Dwelling on a language that isn't high usable is hobby work, not putting food on then table work

It is interesting to see what Apple did here with Swift. They surprised everybody with a language that is usable today. Its might not be 100% of what Apple imagines Swift will be, but it is good enough right now to write viable apps. In other words Swift can put bread on the table

So aside from that, what is there? Is it that Mozilla is involved? Did Google throw out a blog post somewhere claiming that Go is better than Rust for x and y reasons and people took away from it that Rust isn't worth looking at? I'm just so confused over this.

(Go is also an awesome language though, from what I've seen. As soon as Rust is finished, I hope to see >50% of future projects using either Go or Rust )

I really can't answer your questions as frankly I know nothing about these two languages and have remain ignorant of them on purpose. Python and C++ are good enough for my needs and Swift looks like a credible complement to those two. By the way the best reason to avoid Go is that it is associated with Google. The company that does more harm than good.

[hooluupog]

same thing happens with GO.

Go is open source,cross-platform and many of its contributors are non google employees. If you think it jails you,then you should not use python or java either. Because Guido van Rossum and James Gosling have once worked at google.

[hooluupog]

By the way the best reason to avoid Go is that it is associated with Google. The company that does more harm than good.

Then do your best to avoid SPDY,it is also associated with Google. And also i can say' By the way the best reason to avoid swift is that it is associated with Apple',right?

[brosis]

yep, they even work on a Mac!

One has to find balance in life! You can not sustain an economy on free software and frankly you can't assure the types of innovation the world needs via free software Lets face it one of the biggest drivers of innovation is the thought of a payoff in the future. Free software greatly reduces the chances of such a thing happening.

As for finding balance there has to be a rational value to society to compel someone to make a piece of software free The simple examples are in the realms of Genome research. On a volunteered basis just about anything can be seen as a positive in the open source/free community but maybe not so positive in the commercial space. No commercial programmer wants his job to disappear because of open source.

I don't care what works on Mac!
I said - portability, I didn't say "Mac"!

Balance is NOT needed where it is NOT needed. You CAN sustain an economy on free software and CAN assure innovation via free software. Lets face it, you are a Mac and proprietary baboon and your comments greatly reduce quality of discussion on open technology forum such as this.

Because I also don't see software WORKING on platforms that are SANE (such as Linux) or portable to other platforms, I don't give a damn about such programmer loosing a job.
In fact, if he looses a job, it would be very positive for open technology.

So please, LOOSE THE JOB.

Thing is - another "C#" is born, meaning there would be another shitstorm of applications that never work right outside of one platform and have no chance of expansion.
A lock in and another headache for IT.
If you are welcoming that - that alone is an indicator of your values.

[dee.]

One has to find balance in life! You can not sustain an economy on free software and frankly you can't assure the types of innovation the world needs via free software Lets face it one of the biggest drivers of innovation is the thought of a payoff in the future. Free software greatly reduces the chances of such a thing happening.

Yep, I guess that's why that Android thing never took off. Never, ever has free software sustained any kind of economy of millions of people.

Red Hat... Google... Samsung... Intel... none of them ever made billions of dollars by leveraging free software.

Just one question for you... What reality do you live in?

[Yorgos]

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

I believe that all 3 of you enjoy GO and all the rest 5 million languages that companies came up the last 15 years. I hope that you enjoy your wasted time until Google brings GO to EOL, like objC or the other failure called Fox.

Guess what, I can dedicate 2 years maximum to make a language even better than GO, but it will be meaningless.

What Google, Apple, M$ do, is to take an existing language, fork it, add 2 more features and pass it as the next big thing after sliced bread.
That is not the way you make a language useful, neither a language is meant to be a super-set of the features of another language.
Those languages are just fragmenting the market and have no real use, neither they introduce something that doesn't already exist.

Why people stick with companies and their awe-full products, is beyond me, if someone else, besides Google, made the GO language then no-one would use it, because no-one would ever heard about it. Instead of reinventing the wheel with a different name, I suggest people to work on evolving the existing widely used programming languages.

to make things more clear, if I want to use openCL or openGL or openMPI or CUDA or POSIX or SDL or Allegro or Qt or GTK how many programming languages should I master? only one. It's that simple.

There is no right or wrong here, there is only reality. C and C++ are used by programmers who are able to work with embedded devices, make OSes, airspace programming e.t.c., the rest are for the hobbyists.

BTW, it is great to mention how GO was born "The three of us got together and decided that we hated C++.",
which reminds me this http://imgace.com/wp-content/uploads...a-stripper.jpg

[tuubi]

There is no right or wrong here, there is only reality. C and C++ are used by programmers who are able to work with embedded devices, make OSes, airspace programming e.t.c., the rest are for the hobbyists.

Only an idiot would code absolutely everything in a low level programming language. Higher level languages are simply better suited for some tasks.

[Yorgos]

Go is open source,cross-platform and many of its contributors are non google employees. If you think it jails you,then you should not use python or java either. Because Guido van Rossum and James Gosling have once worked at google.

Java is not taken seriously even by Oracle itself. You download the run-time or the dk installer and it seems that it's just another freeware supported by ads.
Python on the other hand is good for people that like the Tab button a lot. I prefer, well I am doing the same thing faster and within fewer lines of code, by using Perl.