Why Apple Should Open-Source Swift -- But Won't

snydeq writes: Faster innovation, better security, new markets — the case for opening Swift might be more compelling than Apple will admit, writes Peter Wayner. "In recent years, creators of programming languages have gone out of their way to get their code running on as many different computers as possible. This has meant open-sourcing their tools and doing everything they could to evangelize their work. Apple has never followed the same path as everyone else. The best course may be to open up Swift to everyone, but that doesn't mean Apple will. Nor should we assume that giving us something for free is in Apple's or (gasp) our best interests. The question of open-sourcing a language like Swift is trickier than it looks."

Comments

What for?

[joh]

There's no shortage of programming languages. Swift isn't anything special. It mostly has value for its integration with Apple's environment and this isn't Open Source either, so what would Swift being Open Source actually be good for? I really can't see why anyone would want to use Swift anywhere than on OS X or iOS when the real value isn't in the language anyway but in the frameworks and the integration with them.

(And I'm not even saying that Apple's approach is better. It's a different approach and has its own advantages and disadvantages. But if you have a closed system using its advantages makes more sense than trying to square the circle.)

Re:What for?

[TheRaven64]

I maintain the GNUstep / Clang Objective-C stack. Most people who use it now do so in Android applications. A lot of popular apps have a core in Objective-C with the Foundation framework (sometimes they use GNUstep's on Android, more often they'll use one of the proprietary versions that includes code from libFoundation, GNUstep and Cocotron, but they almost all use clang and the GNUstep Objective-C runtime). Amusingly, there are actually more devices deployed with my Objective-C stack than Apple's. The advantage for developers is that their core logic is portable everywhere, but the GUIs can be in Objective-C with UIKit on iOS or Java on Android (or, commonly for games, GLES with a little tiny bit of platform-specific setup code). I suspect that one of the big reasons why the app situation on Windows Phone sucks is that you can't do this with a Windows port.

It would be great for these people to have an open source Swift that integrated cleanly with open source Objective-C stacks. Let's not forget that that's exactly what Swift is: a higher-level language designed for dealing with Objective-C libraries (not specifically Apple libraries).

Objective-C is a good language for mid-1990s development. Swift looks like a nice language for early 2000s development. Hopefully someone will come up with a good language for late 2010s development soon...

Re:What for?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Hopefully someone will come up with a good language for late 2010s development soon...

Well, there's always ClozureCL with its Objective-C bridge. :D

Re: Apple not in my best interests either

[kthreadd]

I don't know about that necessarily. Some has contributed a nontrivial amount of work to LLVM and especially the clang project. That has certainly been appreciated outside the Applesphere.

Article shows fundamental lack of understanding

[SuperKendall]

Whoever wrote that article doesn't understand Swift well, or Apple for that matter:

Swift is designed to support a world built bottom up in Objective-C. It's meant to play well with the bazillion lines of existing Objective-C, not supplant it.

This is totally wrong. Apple could not be more clear that Swift is built to supplant Objective-C. It will take a while to re-write the frameworks but they are encouraging everyone now to write new stuff in Swift, and as rapidly as possible making the bridge over to the Objective-C frameworks as Swift friendly as possible.

I think Apple will not open Swift at the moment because they want to have a small core group directing where the language goes, at least at first... and then it will open up more from there. But that also supports the notion that swift is not an auxiliary language, but the primary path going forward.

Re:Your post is a non-sequitur.

[putaro]

The point being that Apple didn't adopt Objective-C just to be weird. Next used Objective-C to build NextStep and there's certain things in Objective-C that made NextStep moderately cool.

I actually worked at Apple, on the operating systems team, around that time. Apple was in no position to be arrogant in 1997 and wasn't actively looking for ways to be incompatible. Today, that's a very different story.

The FSF overreached with GPL v3 ...

[perpenso]

Yeah, but as I recall wasn't the whole reason for clang that they wanted to stop using GCC, as it's truly free software? Perhaps my recollection is incorrect.

Or perhaps you are viewing things through political filters.

Apple, and others, stopped using the "truly free" gcc because GPL v3 became quite restrictive.

The FSF overreached with GPL v3, they tried to be too forceful, they overestimated their importance and irreplaceability. The market responded by moving towards LLVM, a less restrictive option.