Why Apple and Google Made Their Own Programming Languages

Gamoid writes: This Business Insider article looks into the state of Google Go and Apple Swift, highlighting what the two languages have in common — and why tech companies would bother involving themselves in the programming language holy wars. From the article: "One fringe benefit for Google and Apple is that making your own programming language makes recruitment easier — for instance, since it builds a lot of its own server applications in Go, Google is more likely to hire a developer who's already proficient in the language since she would need less training."

Comments

Re:Multiplatform is king - and Go is multiplatform

[ncw]

From wikipedia

Go's "gc" compiler targets the Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Plan 9, and Microsoft Windows operating systems and the i386, amd64, ARM and IBM POWER processor architectures/ A second compiler, gccgo, is a GCC frontend.

So there are two major compilers for Go already, one of which is gcc based which targets just about every platform under the sun. I'm not saying go will run everywhere gcc will compile code because the runtime also needs porting, but it is very cross platform.

I developed one of my command line apps in Go http://rclone.org/ and I release binaries for it which run on Windows, OS X, Linux, *BSD and even Plan 9 all cross compiled from my Linux workstation.

Re:That last sentence makes no sense

[jcr]

Anyone who is proficient in Swift has hundreds or thousands of companies outside of Apple looking to hire them. Apple has to compete with every iOS software development shop in the world for those people.

-jcr