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

[phoronix]

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

[mcirsta]

sure, we really needed another programming language

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

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.

[entropy]

But we do know: no and no.

Also - https://twitter.com/icculus/status/474199283340935168

[droidhacker]

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.

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

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.

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.

[jimbohale]

But we do know: no and no.

Also - https://twitter.com/icculus/status/474199283340935168

Then Apple needs to be encouraged to make it open source, because it's a really good programming language. It could take over. I would absolutely love to see C++ go away.

Of course it's not even fully released, so we don't know yet. They very well could open source it, and tbh it would surprise me if they didn't, but I think it still helps to encourage and push for it.

[Cyborg16]

From the Rust perspective

[mayankleoboy1]

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 ?

[entropy]

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 ?

When we're at choosing something...

The recent names for apples shiny new METAL graphics API and SWIFT language collides with already existing stuff.
Ok, S3's MeTaL API is not relevant anymore by now, but there is also http://swift-lang.org.

Quite cheeky (or careless) IMHO.

[bison]

Then Apple needs to be encouraged to make it open source, because it's a really good programming language. It could take over. I would absolutely love to see C++ go away.

I don't understand why there are so many programmers with this particular totalitarian streak. I see it quite often. You don't like it, so it should cease to exist?

This mindset seems to be peculiar to programmers, and even worse than most car and camera enthusiasts. I've seen Nikon enthusiasts go on and on about how superior their systems are to Canon's, and visa versa, but I've never seen anyone say that they would love to see Canon "go away."

Anyway, I don't mean to attack you personally, I'm just distressed about the hard-line partisanism displayed by so many programmers. It's almost like programming languages have become religions, or political parties.

For what it's worth, I don't much care for C++ either; I have never really gotten to the place where I think the added features are worth the added complexity. If in the future they start deprecating little-used features and make it a smaller language, then maybe I will like it better.

My favorite feature of Swift, from what I know about it so far, is that assignment does not evaluate to a value, so mistakes like

if (a=7) { ... }

becomes compiler errors.

[jrch2k8]

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.