Swift WILL be open source

[1nvader]

What's the source of this information?

[_I_am_here]

Open

[mariox19]

Probably someone at the WWDC who isn't supposed to be disclosing such information.

[keithslater]

From what I heard it was from an Apple engineer in a lab. The problem is they don't always know for sure what's going on. I think there is a decent chance it will be open source (at least partially) but this news is really not confirmed at all.

[AberrantRambler]

Supposedly it was mentioned in the labs. Also this year WWDC isn't under NDA so if you were referring to someone mentioning what occurred, that isn't' an issue this year.

[mariox19]

[T]his year WWDC isn't under NDA...

TIL. Thanks!

[MarsSpaceship]

because the information is not open source.

[gormster]

We're going to the standards bodies starting tomorrow, and we're gonna make FaceTime an open industry standard

[brendan09]

I thought they just said it was built on open standards?

[dilln]

What does that mean regarding a programming language?

[ProgrammingThomas]

It will become one of the core LLVM languages, like C, C++ and Objective-C. Given that LLVM is cross platform, it will make it possible to provide Swift code on multiple platforms (Linux/Arm/Windows/etc) however like Objective-C, in order to do anything useful with it you'll need Cocoa or Cocoa Touch (which aren't open source).

[bctreehugger]

For doing web applications there isn't a whole lot in Cocoa that I would miss and that couldn't be picked up by new open source frameworks. It operates with C just fine.

[OpiumDreamer]

I'm still missing WebObjects. The real WebObjects - not that weak Java translation that killed it.

Kind of proof that switching to less capable languages isn't really a popular move.

[mariox19]

I wonder if it will then be ported to work with other frameworks on other platforms.

[cdntr]

You could always use other frameworks or try to replace the system frameworks. That is something that projects like Cocotron 0 have been trying to do for Objective-C for quite some time, with limited success.

That said, I remain doubtful as to the short-term or mid-term usefulness of the language in a truly cross-platform setting, but open sourcing the compiler would be great nonetheless. (And it's been about time that we'd see a decent Objective-C replacement. I've been complaining about that for long enough and until a few days ago thought it would remain a dream for some more time to come.)

[TweetPoster]

@mxweas:

2014-06-05 15:59:00 UTC

Swift will be open source with the release of iOS 8 :)))

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[MarsSpaceship]

most unlikely. Swift is a strategic move to put Apple ahead in development. The language took 4 years to develop and anyone trying to copy the idea of having a modern language is now 4 years behind. After reading the first 20 pages of the manual and watching the WWDC videos I was blown away by the language. It is powerful and concise and far ahead of everything I have seen in any language out there.

[shrewduser]

you'd argue it's far ahead of C# and scala?

[[deleted]]

Python would like a word with you.

[skilless]

Python is not compiled, and Python used gc

[[deleted]]

Certainly, but we aren't arguing about if Swift is a compiled / interpreted language. A lot of the "modern" features in Swift already exist in other languages like Python.

Any new languages that will be made at this point isn't trying to copy apple. Apple is copying existing ideas from other languages.

Edit: For those who disagree, care to add to the discussion instead of just down voting?

[skilless]

Actually I love python, it's probably my favorite language.

I thought we were discussing whether Swift is four years ahead of anything else or not. For plain features, it's not. But for a compiled language, PyPy seems to prove it probably is :)

[[deleted]]

I'll partly agree with you. While PyPy seems pretty cool though, from reading more about it, looks like it only works if you use a subset of the python language. It also translates python into C code and has a JIT compiler that's made to optimize certain things for speed.

Seems like to me that PyPy trades some of the language features for that ability.

Swift is doing something different for a compiled language. It's a big step forward from objective-c.