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Apple Releases Swift As an Open-Source Project (swift.org)
jcr writes with the news that Apple's Swift has gone open source: From Apple's press release: "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."
It's listed at Apple's GitHub repository, too. (Hat tip to Jono Bacon.)
I've heard that Microsoft is working on a Swift compiler, but I haven't heard what their schedule is supposed to be.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
FaceTime was encumbered by patents Apple don't own. So until they expire, it's not going to be open source.
As to Swift - they only announced it was going open source at WWDC this summer. So no, not years. It's not even years old yet.
And by the way, a lot of slashdotter's cynicism that Swift would not be open sourced is hereby proved wrong.
I read the featured article, and it turns out to be Apache License 2.0.
Since OSX is based on the Mach Kernel and uses a lot of BSD utilities, in many ways both OSX and Linux are Unix.
Fully agreed, but to be pedantically accurate (the best kind of accurate) only OS X is UNIX (as in authorized to use the UNIX Trademark).
I found it extremely easy to port a Linux based CUPS printer driver to OSX
Should be! Apple employes several CUPS developers and purchased the source code about a decade ago.
and what is there to gain for an old school C programmer who doesn't particularly enjoy C++ ?
SWIFT is more or less ObjectiveC made sane. It's basically the same underlying world view, but with a new language with a unified syntax (where as ObjC is like two unrelated languaged bolted together), reduced undefined behaviour, no pointer arithmetic (by default? not sure. Pounters aren't exposed in the same way).
ObjC and so Swift are both very late bound languages, so have a very dynamic feel to them.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
RemObjects makes a free Swift compiler that targets .NET, and thus the binaries would run on Windows. It targets Android too, so you can do Swift on Android as well.
Of course, none of the OSX/iOS frameworks are provided on non-Mac platforms. You're expected to to use the frameworks already provided by the platform you are targetting.
I've only written a couple of apps using it, but I found the syntax to be much more straight forward than either C++ or Objective C. It was pretty easy to pick up on.
The long-hand syntax is very similar to Pascal, with some slight changes to fit more closely in with modern languages. They've replaced BEGIN and END with {}'s, and instead of writing function/procedure, you simply write "func", just to name a few example. Pascal was used as a teaching language at universities back in the 80's until it was replaced by C/C++ in the 90's, and eventually Java more recently. I grew up programming Pascal. It was a wonderful language.
I've found a few excellent YouTube videos which helped ease me into using Swift. The first is the slightly long Swift Tutorial for Beginners, where the guy covers all the changes you'd notice when coming from another programming language.
Another is the Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift, done by Stanford University.
I've been using Swift for a few months now, and I think it's brilliant. Once you know the long-hand version of some of the syntactic sugar they've added, it becomes trivial to develop in. That being said, I find Apple documentation to be about as bad as Oracle's and Microsoft's. The language is easy, the toolkit libraries are vast and sometimes hard to decipher. In addition, being so new it's hard to find good help for specific problems, as most of the answers are in Objective-C.