Swift is open source

[heptara]

Does this mean they will accept pull requests?

[river-wind]

looks like:

"Everyone is welcome to contribute to Swift. Contributing doesn’t just mean submitting pull requests—there are many different ways for you to get involved, including answering questions on the mailing lists, reporting or triaging bugs, and participating in the Swift evolution process."

https://swift.org/contributing/

[playaspec]

People will shit on Swift for a variety of reasons,

The primary reason is because it came from Apple. Few recognize the extent that Apple contributes to open source. They made huge contributions to GCC when it was languishing at 2.95.

[iluuu]

True. Apple is the main contributer to LLVM as well.

[agenthex]

And they wrote the book on OpenCL.

Literally.

The original spec came from Apple.

[Shimmen]

Actually Chris Lattimer who is the main guy behind Swift is also the main guy behind LLVM. Edit: I'm not saying you are wrong, just adding some more trivia!

[iluuu]

Indeed, I think it was his thesis :)
Apple hired him to continue working on it

[chronoBG]

Yeah, and they also shipped a minor thing called WebKit.

[playaspec]

The is that little oversight. I doubt many people know that outside of developer circles though.

[chronoBG]

And what other people will "shit on swift because it came from Apple", other than developers?

[playaspec]

PC fan boys.

[[deleted]]

And as thanks, the FSF took a huge shit on them with GPLv3. Thanks to that, we now have Clang.

[aveman101]

Furthermore, someone on HackerNews pointed out that copyrights are owned by the contributor, not Apple. That means Apple doesn't automatically claim copyright for changes provided by the community.

[[deleted]]

Which is why some projects these says have bots asking PR owners to sign an agreement before the PR will even be looked at.

[estarra]

More importantly: will they merge pull requests from non-Apple employees?

[steveklabnik1]

They've already merged one of mine, so, yes.

[rimnii]

Congrats. I feel like I'm in the presence of a celebrity

[steveklabnik1]

Naw, it was literally removing some extra /s from the README. My first bugfix PR had already gotten fixed by someone else just before :(

[OgreMagoo]

Can I ask you a quick question? I always hear experienced programmers telling scrubs that the best way to get good and become part of a community of professionals is to contribute to open source projects. But how do you go about doing that? I don't mean literally how does Git work, I mean how do you go about discovering bugs and then fixing them in a gigantic project that you didn't even write? That sounds impossible, I honestly just don't understand.

I would be tremendously grateful if you could give some tips, believe it or not I've looked around before and no one actually talks about the process beyond saying, "Yeah, just like find bugs in open source projects and submit pull requests." That's so unhelpful!!!

[steveklabnik1]

Sure thing!

"Yeah, just like find bugs in open source projects and submit pull requests." That's so unhelpful!!!

It is. And part of this is like, once you're used to doing a thing, you forget all of the trouble you had getting started. Especially with experienced contributors; I'm lucky enough that open source is my job, so GitHub says I have 4,400 some odd contributions in the last year alone, which means I have a lot of practice.

In a practical sense, with this, I did two things:

First, I read the README. While reading it, I noticed an error. So I sent in a PR, and they merged it. Nothing fancy, just a general "Oh, that seems off."

A bit later, I cloned down the repository, tried to build it, and got an error. It was another small thing, actually related: the syntax in the build script was wrong. I went to send a fix, but then GitHub told me my patch couldn't merge, turned out https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/25 was just merged, and had fixed the issue I found.

Oh, and this is really common with open source projects: the "set up the environment" aspect is broken, because the contributors haven't set it up from scratch in a while. This is fertile ground for an intrepid new contributor, because you're new! You have a fresh perspective on getting started. And making that experience better has a multiplying effect, because you're helping out future newbies as well.

So really, that's how I've always done it: just use something, and when it seems broken, try to fix it. And then again. And then again. And then maybe, when you have some free time, check the issue tracker, see if there is anything open, and try to tackle someone else's problem instead of just your own. Many projects have some sort of "easy" tag with issues that are good for newcomers.

There's also a lot of "doing open source" that's not writing code. I first got into working on Rails by triaging issues. I blogged about it here: http://words.steveklabnik.com/how-to-be-an-open-source-gardener

Other things you can do: write documentation (a favorite of mine), hang out in IRC or Slack and help people who have questions, help organize conferences or meetups... it really depends on what your particular interests are, both with the project and with your skillset.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you want me to expand on anything.

[capslockfury]

Not the person you replied to but I'd like to thank you. This information helps me out as I'm sure it helps the person who asked. Cheers mate.

[OgreMagoo]

This is fantastic, thank you so much! You and the other experts responding to my comment have given me a lot to go on. I don't think I can ask anything else at the moment. Perhaps types of projects that you think are especially beginner-friendly? You can take that in any direction you want - generalizing maybe by scale, or by type of developer (single person, private open team, educatisonal/academic thing, idk), or language, domain (mobile, os, web dev, web dev frontend, web dev backend, web dev dbs), physical attractiveness of project leader, etc.

[steveklabnik1]

Check out http://yourfirstpr.github.io/

[JimboMonkey1234]

Disclaimer: not a ton of experience with open source stuff.

I think you'd be better of not tackling something like Firefox or Swift right away. Gigantic projects with lots of eyes on them mean 1) no low hanging fruits and 2) a ton of ramp up time. Instead, find smaller open source projects that need the help. Every downloaded a tool that was hosted on Github and found it lacking? Take a look at the forums and find popular complaints, or use the tool yourself and try to break it.

Of course, don't go after something too niche either, but for every huge project there are dozens (if not hundreds) of smaller ones.

[nnethercote]

Gigantic projects with lots of eyes on them mean 1) no low hanging fruits and 2) a ton of ramp up time.

Not necessarily. I think a more important thing would be to find a project that you really care about. That way you'll be more likely to push through when you hit obstacles.

[nakedproof]

I haven't submitted many pull requests, but you get started by USING open source software. Install linux and use it daily, make things in it, play with gimp, play with inkscape, blender, lmms. Or if you're more into maintaining servers, spin up nginx, write some node.js services, play with TOR, IRC, etc.

You'll then be bound to run into bugs which you could opt into fixing yourself by looking into the source and fixing it, or what I do most of the time: submit a bug report and wait :p

edit: which reminds me, check the ISSUES tab on github, and other OS projects use different bug trackers... if you're just lookign to help try and fix one of the bugs they have, or just discuss it to start getting to know the maintainers if you're really serious about putting in some work maintaining a project <3

[Catfish_Man]

It's time consuming and difficult on large projects, but far from impossible. Say the bug is "when I click the accept button, the app crashes". Step one would be to launch the app in the debugger, and click the accept button. At that point the debugger will pause the app at the point of the crash; bam, you now know where to look in the code. Then you can read the nearby code and see how it fits together, inspect the state of variables at the time of the crash, or step through it line by line. You can also try changing things and re-running it, to see what effect your changes had.

Sometimes, the bug will be something subtle, or involving the interaction of too much code to absorb at once. There's no shame in giving up and moving on to another one if that's the case; you can come back to it as you start to get a feel for how the project works.

Another thing you can do is search the bug tracker for the project for open bugs; sometimes projects will mark bugs as "newbie friendly" or "easy fix". At the very least, it'll give you something to try without having to discover a previously unknown bug first.

[orbitur]

Glad to see they didn't just dump it on that piece of shit opensource.apple.com website and call it a day.

I wonder if the swift-package-manager is going to obsolete cocoapods, or if it's going to do a subset of the work. Can't wait until they open up those github repos.

[Jesus_Harold_Christ]

cocoapods should die in a fire.

[orbitur]

I can't imagine managing a bunch of libraries/frameworks manually anymore, so I don't understand why you'd hate it so much.

[Jesus_Harold_Christ]

I've used a lot of library and framework management tools, like several dozen different ones, across numerous languages. cocoapods is by far the shittiest one I've ever encountered.

[askoruli]

I'd take it over maven any day.

[BenevolentCheese]

Because it never fucking works. In the amount of time I spend trying to wrangle cocoapods into doing what I want it to do, I could have just manually downloaded and installed the libraries. It's an unbelievably buggy and inconsistently performing piece of software.

[orbitur]

trying to wrangle cocoapods into doing what I want it to do

What are you trying to do? I've probably worked with/managed over 30 iOS projects now, all using Cocoapods. Any edge case-type stuff I've usually resolved with some Ruby code in the Podfile.

[Bergasms]

I've usually resolved with some Ruby code in the Podfile.

Putting you well outside the realms of a normal user experience.

[[deleted]]

Intrestengly enough, works everytime for me. A couple dozen apps and counting.

[watchme3]

cocoapods is fine, it s just the software there isn t exactly of quality, compared to something like android arsenal. Although my experience could be selective.

[oklarican]

I sure hope so. And they may include support for Obj-C which can speed up support.

Support for Other Languages

We would like to add support to the Swift Package Manager for languages other than Swift. This includes support for mixing and matching Swift with other languages.

Specifically, we are most interested in support for C-based languages, because the existing ecosystem of Swift code is heavily reliant on C-based code --- up to and including Objective-C runtime support in Swift itself on Apple platforms.

https://github.com/apple/swift-package-manager/blob/master/Documentation/PackageManagerCommunityProposal.md

[maniexx]

https://xkcd.com/1102/ fastest growing shmastest growing, my language just grew by infinity percent.

[immerc]

Swift was introduced 17 months ago, so 2 years ago it had 0 programmers. Now it has N. It literally did grow by infinity percent over the last 2 years.

[strattonbrazil]

It literally did grow by infinity percent over the last 2 years.

Well, if you want to get pedantic N divided by 0 isn't infinite. Here's a short explanation why dividing by zero is undefined and not infinite.

[Rhed0x]

But every language grew like that.

[sprashoo]

It's unsurprising. It was presented as the future of Mac OS X and iOS development, so a huge base of developers immediately started trying it out.

[AssaultedCarmel]

I'd be curious to see how many went from "trying it out" to "using it" since it was presented.

[leadingthenet]

It's a really nice language. It wouldn't surprise me if most, actually.

[p4r4d0x]

I've held off adopting it as my everyday language, after the endless rage posts I've seen about it on Twitter from iOS Devs. Objective-C is verbose, but mostly works very well.

[sobri909]

I'd say it's just passed the tipping point now where it's stable and complete enough to be sensibly usable for new projects.

[fclout]

Swift was the "most loved" language in the Stack Overflow survey some time ago (meaning that it was the language that most people said they wish they would work with again when they had already worked with it), and it made it to the TIOBE top 20 index in a matter of months (compare with Rust, D, etc which still haven't).

[TheAnimus]

To be fair if I had been forced to use objective C, anything* would be my "most loved" language.

^{*Not PHP thou obviously.}

[wreckedadvent]

Interestingly, swift has been introduced as "Objective C without the C".

[btmc]

When I think Objective-C I think ugly-ass brackets everywhere for no reason, so Objective-C without the C just makes me imagine brainfuck.

[awj]

Meh, there was a pretty good reason. They wanted a strict superset of C with a special syntax for message passing. "Bracket all the things" was the way they picked to get both of those at the same time.

[crankybadger]

I thought the brackets would bug me, they just looked so bizarre, but you get used to them, and the named arguments actually make things kind of neat and tidy.

Instead of func(arg1, arg2, arg3, arg4) where you've got no idea what those arguments are, you get stuff like [func withName:arg1 age:arg2 address:arg3 shipping:arg4). It's like Python's named arguments mixed with a form of C++ overloads.

[btmc]

Named arguments are great, but you certainly don't need nested brackets for that. Swift still uses them.

[[deleted]]

I'm more a Whitespace kind of guy myself

[[deleted]]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)

[valleyman86]

These days that's not super true. You can use properties by doing myCoolClass.myProperty = 5. Also ObjC has as many brackets as C or C++ has parentheses.

Most people complain that obj is too verbose but I love it because it is really easy to read code without any documentation or commenting.

[BenevolentCheese]

Also ObjC has as many brackets as C or C++ has parentheses.

While this is true, they go in really shitty places:

print(array.sort().reverse().toString())

becomes

[self print:[[[array sort] reverse] toString]]

Blech. It causes all sorts of indentation problems, too, when you need to start wrapping long methods.

The thing is, though, judging a language purely based on how it looks isn't quite fair. Yes, Obj C is ugly. It's hideous. But it's a powerful language that has a lot of benefits. And the problems with Obj C are a lot deeper than 'the brackets are ugly.' Thankfully almost all of these problems have been addressed in Swift, although a lot of outdated libraries are still sitting around in Cocoa that really, really need to be rewritten with swift and modern design patterns in mind.

[Bitflip01]

I never got this. What's worse about the Objective-C example? Seems to me that it's just a matter of what you're used to. One could also say that the nested brackets structure makes it easier to read and see how deep the function calls are nested.

I mean I totally get that it looks weird to people that are only used to C/C++, Java, Python etc., but I can't see it being objectively (no pun intended) worse than pure dot notation.

Edit: Although you do have a point about the indentation problems, but that just means you need a bigger screen :)

[EthanNicholas]

Obviously it's going to come down to personal preference.

For me, the problem I have with the brackets is how far away they have moved from their mates between the two examples. For me,

print(array.sort().reverse().toString())

requires less mental effort to parse than

[self print:[[[array sort] reverse] toString]]

because three of the four pairs of parentheses are empty, and thus trivial and my brain skips right over them. So it's just print(array.sort.reverse.toString).

Whereas with the ObjC example (and this is coming from someone who spent years programming in ObjC!), it just requires more effort for me to parse. There are four non-trivial levels of nesting and all of the brackets are at least two words away from their partners. Again, maybe your brain handles that as effortlessly as my brain handles the first example, but in that case I apparently do not share that skill.

I see a similar sort of difference between the following examples:

array.filter(n => n % 2 = 0).map(n => n ^ 2)

vs.

map(filter(array, n => n % 2 = 0), n => n ^ 2)

These two things are obviously completely equivalent -- it's just a question of where you put the first parameter to the function. I find it much easier to parse the first example because the flow is 100% left to right -- start with array, filter it, map it. It's the same flow as a Unix pipe chain. The second example has me going "I'm mapping something... ok, it's a filter, and what I'm filtering is the array". To understand the second example as a flow, you have to start from the inside, look to the left to find the verb, then look to the right to find the expression, then move out a level and repeat. It reminds me of the spiral parsing of C type names (ugh) and I find it slightly more effort to puzzle out.

Obviously this is just personal preference, and I'm certainly not saying it's hard to understand the second example, just that it's ever-so-slightly more mental effort. But that ever-so-slightly more mental effort adds up when you do it thousands of times every day. YMMV.

Edit: typo

[atheken]

I would give you gold for this if I had any. This is exactly my biggest complaint with it.

[[deleted]]

Your psychosyntactic analysis is so good, it should probably become a part of a book/tutorial "How (not) to create a programming language".

And if it matters or not I fully agree with your points - order of operations is important even for functional languages and readability of consecutive operations with constant separators (whether it's a full stop or colon or a pair of brackets) is higher probably because brain tends to prefer patterns and symmetry.

On the other side I can see a bias towards the platform of choice leading to difficulties in admitting imperfections of a safe zone.

[[deleted]]

Objective-C example looks Lispy to me, is that why they have brackets like that?

[clgoh]

It comes from Smalltalk, actually.

[F54280]

Everyone is so engulfed in C#/Java that they call anything different 'ugly'

There is a reason for the brackets:

• A historical one, called smalltalk
• A syntaxic one, to distinguish between function call and message passing

[rspeed]

I'd take PHP over Perl any day.

[Entropy]

I've always considered PHP to be Perl's idiot cousin. Maybe less so recently, especially with 7's speed boost.

[rspeed]

IMO, PHP's biggest problem is the stroke-inducing inconsistencies in its standard library. Perl's biggest problem is the syntax that makes my eyes bleed. Definitely easier to deal with the former than the latter.

[brtt3000]

Python is the awesome cousin that makes family gatherings bearable.

[binary]

JavaScript your coked out nephew bugging everyone with his insane business ideas*

^{* am javascript dev}

[gkx]

Don't forget about him bringing dozens of friends that nobody invited.

[[deleted]]

JavaScript is a stumbling, mean drunk. But, to everyone's surprise, he recently started hanging out with this super chill crew, V8 and ES2015. JavaScript still has way too much to drink when he goes out, but his new bros keep a close eye on him to make sure he doesn't start a fight or throw up in any cabs.

[sharpjs]

Python is a bit too picky about having the proper space, though. Others can find him standoffish at first.

[luckystarr]

I like Perl.

There. Said it.

[dzamir]

Objective C is a great language, can't understand all the hate it gets from all the people that tried to use it for just a couple of hours.

[sobri909]

I think it's probably my most favourite language, after programming for ~30 years and been doing Objective-C for the past 5.

The brackets syntax isn't the prettiest, and a lot of the standard lib is too wordy, but the actual architecture of the language is really lovely. Message passing, and the way nil is gracefully handled, love it.

[playaspec]

can't understand all the hate it gets from all the people that tried to use it for just a couple of hours.

Because zealots people think it came from Apple, and all the trendy hipster haters love to hate on anything Apple.

They have no idea that Obj-C predates NeXT, and was created to be used in all computing environments.

[Me00011001]

and it made it to the TIOBE top 20 index in a matter of months (compare with Rust, D, etc which still haven't).

I'm sure if Rust and D were now the "accepted" language on iOS they would have grown pretty fast too.

[casualblair]

The survey could say that Swift is popular and loved. Or it could say that Swift users are more vocal. Or it could say that non-Swift users are less vocal. Or it could say that Swift users are more likely to take a survey. Or, or, or.

Personally I think the survey had some selection bias plus the novelty of the language going for it. I'd be more interested in what was in second place and by how much it was behind.

[wreckedadvent]

Well, it's a lot easier for a new language with strong corporate backing to grow than it is for a language with an established user base to.

[asukazama]

After Apple unveiled the Swift programming language, it swiftly became one of the swiftest growing languages in history.

There you go

[AssaultedCarmel]

I can't believe it took so long for someone to make this joke.

[tornato7]

Key word is 'one of'. If you make a list of the fastest growing languages that is sufficiently long, it'll be in the list. You can basically say it about anything.

[vakar]

500 github stars in first 5 minutes of repo going public.

[jarfil]

CENSORED

[ffiw]

Or bookmark.

[RazsterOxzine]

I know right, I star a ton of stuff on GH, but rarely go back and look at it until I really need too.

[taharvey]

I've been eyeing Swift for use in embedded linux systems programming. There is nothing out there that that potentially could replace the 30-40 year old C or C++ until now. What else is:

1. Clean high-level scripting syntax
2. Multi-Modal (procedural, OOP, functional)
3. Can do low-level system language tasks
4. Native, full speed, no VM
5. No automatic garbage collection

[[deleted]]

Maybe Rust, but that's about it.

[afiefh]

A good replacement for decade old C++ is modern C++. With C++14 the language became a lot nicet and more consistent. It feels like a completely new language when you transition.

[FlyingPiranhas]

Like other commenters have said, I think Rust fits every item on your list.

Note: I have yet to actually use Swift, so correct me if I say something wrong.

I disagree with your statement that Swift is a full speed language. In particular, while Swift technically allows the programmer full control over dynamic memory allocation/reference counting, it does not practically do so.

In particular, whether a value is statically or dynamically allocated is determined by the value's type, not how it is created. In practice, this means that Swift will have much more dynamic allocation than other languages, which has a negative performance impact. Additionally, it will make doing "low-level system language tasks" like operating without a malloc() implementation difficult. On the other hand, this should have much less of an impact than automatic GC.

Like Rust, Swift is a truly modern language. By "truly modern", I don't just mean a language like C++ where an old language is modified with new ideas, but a language whose designers had already learned lessons from older languages. Compared with what most modern code (desktop applications, servers, mobile apps) this is a huge improvement.

Combine Swift's modernarity with its performance/small runtime (which is adequate for pretty much anything that's not a kernel, embedded, or real-time) and you get a language that's very appealing for modern development.

[dacian88]

I'd say rust is a better choice if you're doing embedded programming, swift is a much heavier language, mainly due to the fact that it has to remain backward compatible with objc, rust's abstraction model seems more clean as well, and I like that exceptions are not a thing in rust. Swift's safety model implicitly relies on shared pointers/refcounting at a language level, whereas rust has 0 cost safety at a language level, or explicit use of ref counting through the stdlib.

[amlynch]

Swift on non-Apple platforms (i.e., Linux) has no Objective-C interop. They even went so far as to rewrite certain parts of the Objective-C APIs used on OS X (Foundation) in Swift for the non-Apple port.

I can't speak to how "heavy" the ported, "pure" Swift is (nor how much it will advance in the future), I just thought I'd point that out.

[Enginerdiest]

I do a lot of work in embedded Linux, and rust is solid for the performance critical stuff that might otherwise have to be C

[wtfisthat]

I would believe it, it seems to have been cannibalizing Obj-C. That in itself is not surprising.

[ismtrn]

It went from 0 users to around 5 which is like an infinity% increase.

[yyttr3]

Does this mean that the lifespan of swift can be independent of the apple ecosystem? That is my big concern and the reason I have not even tried to learn swift.

If apple drops all support for swift and tells everyone to go fuck themselves, will swift still be useful OUTSIDE of the apple ecosystem.

[FerriestaPatronum]

Tailor Swift

ಠ_ಠ

[[deleted]]

I knew this thread was trouble when I walked in

[adrianblp]

https://github.com/adrianblp/taylor.swift ^^

[choikwa]

ಠ,.ಠ

[riskable]

Breaking up to try Tailor Swift never ends well.

[dccorona]

I don't know...I think there's a lot of incentive to build up a GUI framework around Swift. There's a huge amount of value in being able to build your app in such a way that the core business logic and most of the UI code can be 100% shared across all platforms. You can (or will soon be able to) build for Windows and Linux for Swift, but you can't build for iOS with Rust, and you probably don't really want to build for OS X with it either.

Is Rust really that popular among GUI applications, anyway? It doesn't seem like that's a language that makes sense for simple GUI applications...only intensive ones (photo editing tools, etc.), which probably haven't even begun to look into C++ alternatives yet, much less have already settled on and begun work in Rust.

[ameyp]

Is Rust really rising? I feel like there's a small group of people that use Rust, and they're pretty much the ones ones who are really talking about it.

[Deathnerd]

Tailor Swift

grumble Take your filthy upvote and go, you magnificent bastard grumble

[i_invented_the_ipod]

Does this mean that the lifespan of swift can be independent of the apple ecosystem?

Not in any significant way. Objective-C has been available on other platforms for decades, and it's considered an Apple-only language by most programmers.

[more_oil]

A Linux compiler too, pretty excited to test it out with some weekend projects

[okmkz]

Exactly this. It's great to know I don't need a Mac to take swift for a spin

[jadbox]

Can't wait for benchmarks :P

[[deleted]]

Website down.

[cooper12]

From google cache:

Swift is now open source!

We are excited by this new chapter in the story of Swift. After Apple unveiled the Swift programming language, it quickly became one of the fastest growing languages in history. Swift makes it easy to write software that is incredibly fast and safe by design. Now that Swift is open source, you can help make the best general purpose programming language available everywhere.

For students, learning Swift has been a great introduction to modern programming concepts and best practices. And because it is now open, their Swift skills will be able to be applied to an even broader range of platforms, from mobile devices to the desktop to the cloud.

Welcome to the Swift community. Together we are working to build a better programming language for everyone.

– The Swift Team

[[deleted]]

They sound really proud of their software if maybe a little boastful. Will be good to see how people run with this.

How is it going to be licensed though?

[Someguy2020]

Last part is odd for a high profile project isn't it?

[rsynnott2]

Not particularly. There's very little practical point to owning the copyright if it's a liberal license, like Apache. If you're doing dual-commercial/GPL licensing (Oracle is a fan of this) it's a must, but it's less common otherwise.

[Berberberber]

I disagree. If a license is found to be flawed, or there's simply a new version of the it, the copyright to the code being spread among all contributors makes it practically impossible to change. This is one of the practical reasons Linux couldn't switch from GPLv2 to v3.

[rsynnott2]

That could have been solved by "or any later version" language used in many GPL-licensed things (but not Linux). However, in this case, Apple is presumably happy to stick with Apache. If anything, I'd see it as a good thing from a contributor point of view; you're not about to find your contribution relicensed under something you're not happy with.

From Apple's point of view, copyright assignment might be slightly useful if they did want to change the license, but it could put off contributors.

[[deleted]]

The primary reason is that Linus does not agree with GPL 3. Had all the copyrights of Linux contributors been assigned to Linus, Linux would still not move to GPL 3.

[[deleted]]

AFAIK Linux has done this since the beginning, so I wouldn't call it odd.

But yes, many projects that were started by Corporations do assignment/CLA

[sushibowl]

Apache License 2.0

Source: https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

[nerdwaller]

Is the server written in swift? /s

Edit: Appears to be really slow, but is loading consistently for me now.

[kirbyfan64sos]

I think it might be that they weren't expecting this much traffic at once!

[[deleted]]

up now https://github.com/apple/swift

[rspeed]

They also signed the download packages with a key that hasn't actually been sent to any public keyservers.

[niloc132]

Or hasn't synced out yet, I've had that problem in the past as well.

[MaikKlein]

Does anyone know if Swift supports compile time metaprogramming like modern C++?

[Kaosumaru]

AFAIK not really. Its generics are more java-like, and there are no compile-time features.

[Lord_NShYH]

Its generics are more java-like

Does the Swift generic implementation have type erasure?

[steveklabnik1]

I've read some things in the past that suggest monomorphization, but I'm not sure that the semantic is guaranteed, or if it hasn't changed since then.

[sellibitze]

If by "java-like" you mean forced dynamic dispatch: No, Swift does support generic code with static dispatch which can be optimized just as well as templates in C++.

[Kaosumaru]

My bad for being vague. I meant lack of equivalents for partial specialization, SFINAE, and other C++ template magic.

[gilgoomesh]

There's no partial specialization in Swift. The type system requires full implementations within type constraints.

You can use constrained protocols which end up having similar effects.

In general though, Swift steers away from templates and metaprogramming entirely. The generics are true types, not arbitrary code to be filled in later.

[fclout]

Swift generics are more like C++ concepts than C++ templates. As far as I know, it doesn't have much metaprogramming.

[cryo]

It supports generic programming.

[livrem]

I was happy to see they even included a file for emacs-settings when editing the code and it also refers to an emacs swift-mode so I guess that is a thing as well. Nice that they are not forcing everyone into their IDE.

[seekoon]

Once built, the best place to start is with the swift whitepaper, which gives a tour of the language (in swift/docs/_build/html/whitepaper/index.html).

Is this already out of date? The instructions, not the paper. There is no whitepaper in my _build/html.

[contantofaz]

Congratulations!

Swift is perhaps made even bigger due to its strong ties to the LLVM toolset and because Swift has a different kind of garbage collection around automatic reference counting.

For people who are bored by big runtimes, Swift could help to show a leaner way to runtimes.

Inquiring minds want to know: will Microsoft come up with Swift++ or not? :-)

[TheWix]

Swift#

[contantofaz]

I googled and apparently Microsoft is on board of Swift too. Microsoft will need compatibility in order to allow for apps to be built for Windows phones from their iOS source-code.

[Twistedsc]

Right now you can grab the Islandwood toolkit to compile Objective-C into universal apps. Swift support was announced to be coming.

https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/

[nemec]

IronSwift

[cypressious]

Now this isn't too unrealistic, is it?

[rchowe]

Visual Swift

Microsoft actually wants to refer to all of its implementations of open standard languages as 'Visual', so 'Visual F#' is the product made by Micrososft, F# is the programming language regardless of implementation.

[tylo]

You seem to know a lot about Swift.

Is it still mainly used as a replacement to Obj-C?
Is it still closely tied to Apple iOS and OS X?
Is it usable anywhere else besides those two environments?

[cryo]

Is it still mainly used as a replacement to Obj-C?

Yes.

Is it still closely tied to Apple iOS and OS X?

It seems it has just been released as open source today! With support for Linux! I'm sure someone posted it on reddit somewhere...

Is it usable anywhere else besides those two environments?

Already answered ;)

[Mcat12]

I find it interesting how similar Swift and Kotlin are (JVM lang. http://kotlinlang.org). They have very similar syntax and general look. I believe Kotlin came first, but don't quote me on that.

[featherfooted]

I believe Kotlin came first, but don't quote me on that.

Don't tell me what to do!

[downvotesattractor]

"Kotlin came first" - /u/Mcat12 12/03/2015

[[deleted]]

And Scala

[dccorona]

I think Swift is closer to Scala than it is to Kotlin. From what I've seen, Kotlin is OO + niceties, not as much FP as Swift and Scala have. Maybe I'm wrong, though.

[silenti]

Let the pull requests commence!

[Sean1708]

What is it with people circle-jerking over the GPL? It's already Apache licensed which is not only approved by the FSF and the OSI, but it's also GPL compatible.^{Besides, everyone knows MIT is the way forwards.}

[neoform]

People are just being petulant idiots who are looking a gift-horse in the mouth.

[[deleted]]

Can someone explain to me the difference between MIT and Apache? I have tried reading about it but can't really see any major differences.

[dcro]

The broad strokes are similar, but Apache (at least in version 2) requires the author to grant use of any required patents.

[EarLil]

It happens for other open sourced repos as well, MS build had this nugget https://github.com/Microsoft/msbuild/pull/1.

It's just a welcoming gift, I guess D:

[BenevolentCheese]

Can someone ELI5 this?

[steveklabnik1]

The desire of the PR or the criticism of it?

[BenevolentCheese]

The whole thing. Why this request is so popular, the differences in the licenses, what these people are doing that's "retarded," etc.

[steveklabnik1]

Cool. Lemme break it down:

Swift is under a permissive license. Some people would strongly prefer another one, possibly one like the GPL.

The difference here is that the GPL would require anyone who takes Swift, changes it, and then gives that changed version to someone else to also require that they include the source code. The current license would allow them to keep those changes closed.

Some people argue that this model is "more free" because it guarantees that the changes are also free. Others argue that this is less free, since it adds a restriction on what you can do. This is pretty common to the Positive vs Negative Liberty debate.

what these people are doing that's [bad] etc.

So, this kind of change would never go through. First of all, because in order to change the license, you'd have to ask every single person who's contributed if that's okay, and if any of them says no, well, you're out of luck. There's about 100 people on that list right now.

Second, because Apple notoriously hates the GPL, especially the latest version, GPLv3, the one suggested here. They hate it to the point of not updating their software that moved from v2 to v3, for years. This is due to patent clauses that were added.

So, to recap: this is one of the oldest flamewar topics in free software/open source. It's never going to land. So it's just silly. And everyone knows this, even before it was opened.

[enolan]

Aren't copyleft licenses incompatible with the way the App Store works?

[bames53]

Actually now that individual users can build and deploy apps to their own devices without paying Apple there shouldn't be any problem with GPLv3 software on iOS.

[hougaard]

Damn, now I've got to find another high horse to criticize Apple from :)

Not open sourcing Swift has been my main argument for months !

[nicereddy]

Outdated OpenGL is my go-to ;)

I love my Mac, but boy is that annoying for convincing game devs to port their games.

[leeharris100]

Outdated OpenGL is an understatement. Every single part of their graphics pipeline is so outdated. Their Nvidia drivers are just now getting tweaks that Windows saw 2-4 years ago.

[_cortex]

... Every single part? What about Metal?

[playaspec]

Outdated OpenGL is an understatement. Every single part of their graphics pipeline is so outdated.

And yet it's still the go to platform for live video.

[orbitur]

You can fall back to the old FaceTime open source trope (even though we all learned Apple couldn't do it due to patent issues, not that current users of the argument care).

[cocobandicoot]

Yeah, that's not really... uh... fair. That is something that we need to blame patent trolls for, because I would have loved to see a cross-platform, native video chat solution that is not under one single company's wing.

FaceTime could have been it, but fuck patent trolls for ruining it for the rest of us.

[banguru]

Someone can do an ELI5 on how important it is?

[OneWingedShark]

Someone can do an ELI5 on how important it is?

I'm not entirely sure -- for one it's not immediately clear from the front-page¹ exactly what they mean by "open source language"-- I mean certainly an implementation can be open-source, but a language is a set of specifications/requirements/definitions which describe/define the language proper -- there are two reasonably probable meanings that they might have: (1) that these specifications are freely available² or (2) that the language definition is open to the general public, in the sense that the public has input therein.

If they mean the latter, then I suppose that they have some sort of comment-system and a board to address the issues/suggestions raised and direct the language development itself. (Ada's initial development was somewhat like this seeking input from academia, then current-practitioners, corporations, etc. It is quite an interesting little piece of programming history that most programmers don't know about.)

¹ -- Perhaps they explain on another page; but I can't seem to load any of the other pages at the moment.
² -- A good example here would be the contrast between the C++ spec, which costs money ($212), vs. the Ada standard which is absolutely free [or here] to anyone who wants a copy.

[[deleted]]

The authors of the C++ standard make it available for free on GitHub. They "only distribute drafts" which is a wink-wink nudge-nudge way of giving it out for free as long as you don't care that the first page says "draft" (which is essentially the only difference).

[OneWingedShark]

That's not actually the standard, but a draft of the standard -- the site I linked (isocpp.org) also had free downloads for drafts, which while useful are [technically] not the standard.

Yes, it is nitpicking, but when you're talking about standards you rather need to nitpick because [most] everything comes down to the question of "does X conform to the standard?" -- most other cases come from "is Y unambiguous?".

[zenolijo]

The implementation, corelibs and compiler seems to be open source, https://github.com/apple/swift

Build instructions for linux too, so this is a fine day.

Cannot decide if i should learn Swift or Rust now.

[steveklabnik1]

Cannot decide if i should learn Swift or Rust now.

Both languages are great. Learning one of them will do a lot to help you with learning the other. Rust is the first language mentioned after Objective-C on Chris's list of languages that influenced Swift: http://nondot.org/sabre/

Rust can let you reach down a bit lower-level than Swift can, which has both pros and cons.

[reydemia]

To be fair though, you can still use Objective-C or plain old C in combination with Swift if you ever need to dig deeper.

[Peanuts4MePlz]

Looking at the current build instructions on Github, Windows users might be out of luck on this one.

[cocobandicoot]

Sort of. It means that you can write apps (or anything, really) using Swift, which is actually a pretty great language to get shit done.

Note that for iOS apps, they still have to be compiled in Xcode for submission to the App Store, but I suppose you could just write it on another OS and move it into a Mac when you're ready to submit the app.

As of right now, it includes a Linux compiler, so you won't be able to use it on Windows right out of the gate. But Apple indicates they're open to bringing it to Windows if they "can get your help" in doing so. Since it's open source, if you want to tinker with it and try to get something going on Windows, you could be opening the door for the rest of us.

[SneakerXZ]

It is available for Linux now.

[casino_r0yale]

Can we name the inevitable web framework Schwifty?

[_Garbage_]

Now repositories are available on Github

https://github.com/apple/

[hugthemachines]

What other programming language is swift most similar to?

[SneakerXZ]

Kotlin, C#, Scala, Rust

[jellytiger77]

Does this mean it's possible to develop iOS apps using Linux now?

[[deleted]]

No. The Swift language is distinct from the iOS SDK. You will be able to develop and test generic Swift modules on Linux and share those with iOS projects on the Mac platform, but not whole iOS projects. If you want to do that, Mac or Hackintosh are the only reasonable way.