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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."
If Apple doesn't want the help of the OSS community then forget 'em.
Why bother crying and begging them to allow you to strengthen their products? If you want to work on Swift then send your resume to Apple.
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...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You're both wrong/right. In order to supplant Objective-C, Swift would have to play well with the bazillion lines of Objective-C, and coexist with it for possibly a very long time. On the other hand, even if Apple "could not be more clear" that swift is built to supplant Objective-C, that doesn't mean it will succeed, and doesn't mean Apple won't change their mind. It's a gamble and they certainly know it. They keep that to themselves in order to encourage you to drink the cool-aid.
.NET
See also: Microsoft and
To be clear: Apple aren't just a contributor, they created Clang and employ one of the LLVM project's founders to work on LLVM, Clang, and Swift.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.