8 ms·

Google forked Swift

118 points by eonil 9y ago

nawtacawp 9y ago
Perhaps this is the start of moving Android Apps to Swift. Which, per rumor was considered last year: "About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language for Android" https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-swift/ https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-sw...
- rainboiboi 9y ago
  That would be great news. Unification of mobile programming language.
  - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
    React is good enough for most of the mobile projects out there. Hint: its none of the ones you use.
    - reustle 9y ago
      React Native hasn't lost its PATENTS file yet, so no other large company would bank heavily on it.
      - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
        yeah but we're not talking large companies
  - rectang 9y ago
    That would be great for developers like you and me -- after all, our skills are most valuable when they are portable. How much more can we get done if we don't have to support multiple platforms? However, the interests of vendors are diametrically opposed to our interests as developers -- it is all about vendor lockin, and making it as hard as possible for us to support competing platforms.
    - rtpg 9y ago
      I understand the theory, but in practice this means if you want to implement a competing platform... you just need to write a Swift target! Much easier for developers to go check out your platform. More unification would likely also mean better abstraction layers across platforms, meaning that competing platforms could rely on those abstraction layers. Think about how nice it is that most devices out there are running at least a flavor of Unix. You have a base-level expectation of how things can be integrated. There are of course differences, but generally if you write your stuff in a certain way you can use it almost everywhere! And for those who don't want to work on Unix, all you need is a compatability layer to bring over some useful tools. Just get that C compiler up and running and you get a lot of stuff too! The reason this is different from other forms of platform lock-in is that ultimately things like programming languages don't cover the full stack, so there are "obvious" places where you can swap either your language, the stuff underneath, or the stuff above it.
- devdoomari 9y ago
  maybe 'was'? kotlin is the official google's recommendation for android now... (and kotlin can have multiple 'backends' -- e.g. build-to-java / native / web / etc)
  - philwelch 9y ago
    Kotlin could just be a stopgap, though. It’s still a JVM language so it’s an easier migration, and from what little I’ve seen it doesn’t add very much other than syntactic sugar for null checks.
    - mdkMM 9y ago
      I doubt Kotlin is a stop-gap measure, and it does a lot more than just give syntactic sugar for null checks. As the comment above you mentioned it's not only JVM, it has a JS backend and a fully native one which is developing very rapidly. Kotlin and Swift have a very significant overlap in language features, and with how strong the Kotlin community is, I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, I would sooner see multiplatform development embracing Kotlin over Swift, given how well it's progressing. Kotlin native hasn't even reached 1.0 yet, and they already made a very convincing showcase of how it can be used to develop server backend + frontend + android + iOS with significant code reuse, and not having to constantly switch language contexts: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlinconf-app https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlinconf-app
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  If I were Google I would just invest into the native, LLVM-backed Kotlin thing. I guess the advantage of Swift would be using 1 lang for 2 platforms but at the end of the day the APIs are different enough that idk if it would matter.
- DannyBee 9y ago
  As mentioned above, this fork is for staging patches written by some folks that are part of an internal-facing IOS tooling team. Nothing more. They aren't related to or even located organizationally anywhere near Android.
kvirani 9y ago
What does this mean in terms of their adoption / integration of the language?
- nawtacawp 9y ago
  I only remember reading a small tidbit about this last year: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-swift/ https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-sw... "Google is said to be considering Swift as a ‘first class’ language for Android" "About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language for Android"
  - revelation 9y ago
    They integrated Kotlin with the very recent 3.0 version of Android Studio.
AceJohnny2 9y ago
> This branch is 48 commits behind apple:master. Meh, looks more like a mirror. May even have been accidental. Do you know how they decide what lands under Github's google/ umbrella?
kcoul 9y ago
What the fork!
- nvr219 9y ago
  oh ho ho ho ho
incadenza 9y ago
Maybe for work on their own iOS products? Strange.
geofft 9y ago
Google corporate policy, to the best of my knowledge (I do not and have never worked for Google but I asked lots of questions when evaluating an offer), is that it's significantly easier to let Google retain copyright on your open source work, and if it's on GitHub you have to host your repo at github.com/google if Google retains copyright. ("Forks" with no code changes ending up at the top of HN, as if they signaled a major shift in corpprate strategy, are an excellent example of why I think this is a bad policy. For all we know some Google employee PR'd a typo fix they noticed one weekend and has since deleted the branch.)
- DannyBee 9y ago
  Google's policies are actually mostly open too, so you don't have to guess :) (they are linked from the open source page). They are now a bit out of date, a few things have been simplified/relaxed (generally, the goal is as little process as possible). Then again, people also like to super-duper parse the words in the docs, which are not really written to be parsed that way.
revelation 9y ago
There are some 1500 people in the Google organization, so presumably just one of them pressed fork and selected the org accidentally. GitHubs UI makes this super easy.
DannyBee 9y ago
This is being used as a staging place for putting patches so they can be turned into pull requests, nothing more. Sorry to bust any conspiracy theories. (You can see this happens on >100 of the swift forks :P)
- dikaiosune 9y ago
  parent's HN bio: > I run all the production and cloud programming language teams at Google, and am also an open source lawyer.
  - DannyBee 9y ago
    Those words are pretty literal, actually. Which means I don't own Swift at Google, i just know what they are doing because i approved it another capacity :)
    - username223 9y ago
      > Which means I don't own Swift at Google, i just know what they are doing because i approved it another capacity :) Are you sure you didn't mean ";)" there? > I run all the production and cloud programming language teams at Google, and am also an open source lawyer. Smiley-face to you as well, friend. You get paid well into six figures to do this, while I just try to figure out how you're screwing me on evenings and weekends. I don't pretend to understand the technicalities of what you're typing, but I suspect that I will lose.
      - cridenour 9y ago
        ...what?
        username223 9y ago
        ...who?
- bobajeff 9y ago
lexlash 9y ago
Hi! I’m one of the engineers on this. We’ve got some work we’re collaborating on - all of which is going upstream - and we wanted a shared place to stage it while we prepare PRs. I’ll be pushing a statement to our fork tomorrow. (I’m personally working on Bazel rules and contributions to lib/Syntax. If you find that exciting, please get in touch! :)
- philwelch 9y ago
  Thank God. Otherwise this seemed like a very Microsoft/Java strategy.
  - eonil 9y ago
    I also worried having two different languages -- Google Swift and Apple Swift.
    - pvg 9y ago
      Maybe you should have tried to find out what this is about before posting it with a completely made up title?
      - veidr 9y ago
        It's not a "made up title", Google did in fact fork Swift on GitHub. That doesn't mean anything in an of itself, thousands of people/organizations have also done so, but it's mildly interesting since it's Google, and because it was posted here, we now know why. Don't see a problem.
        geofft 9y ago
        The problem is that "fork" means two different things at this point. Compare "FFmpeg developers fork FFmpeg" in the sense of "...and create libav" and in the sense of "...so they can submit pull requests." One is extremely newsworthy, one is extremely not. If you're posting something to HN, it's a reasonable assumption that readers will think you're posting a newsworthy thing as opposed to not.
anderskaseorg 9y ago
Anyone else think it’s dumb that you have to fork a repository just to submit a pull request? Why doesn’t GitHub let you do it in one command like ‘git push origin master:refs/pull/new’?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
useranme 9y ago
I don't know much about Swift. Has anyone written in it something they can demo? Can it write gui and web apps? What's the biggest problem it solves and how do you like the language?
viksit 9y ago
Can we change the title to “google forked the swift GitHub repo” or somesuch? The current one is rather misleading!
- lamontcg 9y ago
  Can we change the title to "google prepares a nothingburger"?
mastax 9y ago
Should change the title to "Google has a fork of Swift"
- eonil 9y ago
  Does it feel differently? "fork" as a noun and a verb? No offense, just a question. Because I'm not a native English speaker.
moocowtruck 9y ago
how is this news ... hey look software was forked on github today!
startupdiscuss 9y ago
Great news. Now if they can just make it an option on Android and Chrome and someone builds a front end and a back end framework we’re home free.
codesternews 9y ago
May I know why it's flagged? @Dan or some other person
- Erwin 9y ago
  Google has not in fact, forked Swift. So there's no news here, just FUD.
codesternews 9y ago
I will really kill google if he messes with my favourite language :(. Sorry for this language but I do not want it to be at google home. You guys do not respect others.
codesternews 9y ago
If Chris Lattner (Swift Creator) is behind this. I am more than ok, else I do not think this is the process. You should raise proposal to swift community and if it gets accepted you start working on it. Not other way around. You create fork and try to push and if they does not agree with you. You will say ok we are having our own fork. reply
sidcool 9y ago
Why is this flagged?
- szatkus 9y ago
  I guess that title is little controversial. For people unfamiliar with GitHub process it may sound like Google prepares their own version of Swift (which is not a case as explained in the top comment).
stablemap 9y ago
https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/930832426548436992 https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/930832426548436992 Swift at Google has enough folks working on it that we need a staging ground/integration point, and we decided it should be public.
apple4ever 9y ago
Can they make a MR to fix the terrible syntax?

118 points by eonil 9y ago

Perhaps this is the start of moving Android Apps to Swift. Which, per rumor was considered last year: "About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language for Android" https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-swift/ https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-sw...

rainboiboi 9y ago
That would be great news. Unification of mobile programming language.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  React is good enough for most of the mobile projects out there. Hint: its none of the ones you use.
  - reustle 9y ago
    React Native hasn't lost its PATENTS file yet, so no other large company would bank heavily on it.
    - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
      yeah but we're not talking large companies
- rectang 9y ago
  That would be great for developers like you and me -- after all, our skills are most valuable when they are portable. How much more can we get done if we don't have to support multiple platforms? However, the interests of vendors are diametrically opposed to our interests as developers -- it is all about vendor lockin, and making it as hard as possible for us to support competing platforms.
  - rtpg 9y ago
    I understand the theory, but in practice this means if you want to implement a competing platform... you just need to write a Swift target! Much easier for developers to go check out your platform. More unification would likely also mean better abstraction layers across platforms, meaning that competing platforms could rely on those abstraction layers. Think about how nice it is that most devices out there are running at least a flavor of Unix. You have a base-level expectation of how things can be integrated. There are of course differences, but generally if you write your stuff in a certain way you can use it almost everywhere! And for those who don't want to work on Unix, all you need is a compatability layer to bring over some useful tools. Just get that C compiler up and running and you get a lot of stuff too! The reason this is different from other forms of platform lock-in is that ultimately things like programming languages don't cover the full stack, so there are "obvious" places where you can swap either your language, the stuff underneath, or the stuff above it.
devdoomari 9y ago
maybe 'was'? kotlin is the official google's recommendation for android now... (and kotlin can have multiple 'backends' -- e.g. build-to-java / native / web / etc)
- philwelch 9y ago
  Kotlin could just be a stopgap, though. It’s still a JVM language so it’s an easier migration, and from what little I’ve seen it doesn’t add very much other than syntactic sugar for null checks.
  - mdkMM 9y ago
    I doubt Kotlin is a stop-gap measure, and it does a lot more than just give syntactic sugar for null checks. As the comment above you mentioned it's not only JVM, it has a JS backend and a fully native one which is developing very rapidly. Kotlin and Swift have a very significant overlap in language features, and with how strong the Kotlin community is, I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, I would sooner see multiplatform development embracing Kotlin over Swift, given how well it's progressing. Kotlin native hasn't even reached 1.0 yet, and they already made a very convincing showcase of how it can be used to develop server backend + frontend + android + iOS with significant code reuse, and not having to constantly switch language contexts: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlinconf-app https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlinconf-app
adamnemecek 9y ago
If I were Google I would just invest into the native, LLVM-backed Kotlin thing. I guess the advantage of Swift would be using 1 lang for 2 platforms but at the end of the day the APIs are different enough that idk if it would matter.
DannyBee 9y ago
As mentioned above, this fork is for staging patches written by some folks that are part of an internal-facing IOS tooling team. Nothing more. They aren't related to or even located organizationally anywhere near Android.

kvirani 9y ago

What does this mean in terms of their adoption / integration of the language?

nawtacawp 9y ago
I only remember reading a small tidbit about this last year: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-swift/ https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-sw... "Google is said to be considering Swift as a ‘first class’ language for Android" "About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language for Android"
- revelation 9y ago
  They integrated Kotlin with the very recent 3.0 version of Android Studio.

AceJohnny2 9y ago

> This branch is 48 commits behind apple:master. Meh, looks more like a mirror. May even have been accidental. Do you know how they decide what lands under Github's google/ umbrella?

kcoul 9y ago

What the fork!

nvr219 9y ago
oh ho ho ho ho

incadenza 9y ago

Maybe for work on their own iOS products? Strange.

geofft 9y ago

Google corporate policy, to the best of my knowledge (I do not and have never worked for Google but I asked lots of questions when evaluating an offer), is that it's significantly easier to let Google retain copyright on your open source work, and if it's on GitHub you have to host your repo at github.com/google if Google retains copyright. ("Forks" with no code changes ending up at the top of HN, as if they signaled a major shift in corpprate strategy, are an excellent example of why I think this is a bad policy. For all we know some Google employee PR'd a typo fix they noticed one weekend and has since deleted the branch.)

DannyBee 9y ago
Google's policies are actually mostly open too, so you don't have to guess :) (they are linked from the open source page). They are now a bit out of date, a few things have been simplified/relaxed (generally, the goal is as little process as possible). Then again, people also like to super-duper parse the words in the docs, which are not really written to be parsed that way.

revelation 9y ago

There are some 1500 people in the Google organization, so presumably just one of them pressed fork and selected the org accidentally. GitHubs UI makes this super easy.

DannyBee 9y ago

This is being used as a staging place for putting patches so they can be turned into pull requests, nothing more. Sorry to bust any conspiracy theories. (You can see this happens on >100 of the swift forks :P)

dikaiosune 9y ago
parent's HN bio: > I run all the production and cloud programming language teams at Google, and am also an open source lawyer.
- DannyBee 9y ago
  Those words are pretty literal, actually. Which means I don't own Swift at Google, i just know what they are doing because i approved it another capacity :)
  - username223 9y ago
    > Which means I don't own Swift at Google, i just know what they are doing because i approved it another capacity :) Are you sure you didn't mean ";)" there? > I run all the production and cloud programming language teams at Google, and am also an open source lawyer. Smiley-face to you as well, friend. You get paid well into six figures to do this, while I just try to figure out how you're screwing me on evenings and weekends. I don't pretend to understand the technicalities of what you're typing, but I suspect that I will lose.
    - cridenour 9y ago
      ...what?
      - username223 9y ago
        ...who?
bobajeff 9y ago

lexlash 9y ago

Hi! I’m one of the engineers on this. We’ve got some work we’re collaborating on - all of which is going upstream - and we wanted a shared place to stage it while we prepare PRs. I’ll be pushing a statement to our fork tomorrow. (I’m personally working on Bazel rules and contributions to lib/Syntax. If you find that exciting, please get in touch! :)

philwelch 9y ago
Thank God. Otherwise this seemed like a very Microsoft/Java strategy.
- eonil 9y ago
  I also worried having two different languages -- Google Swift and Apple Swift.
  - pvg 9y ago
    Maybe you should have tried to find out what this is about before posting it with a completely made up title?
    - veidr 9y ago
      It's not a "made up title", Google did in fact fork Swift on GitHub. That doesn't mean anything in an of itself, thousands of people/organizations have also done so, but it's mildly interesting since it's Google, and because it was posted here, we now know why. Don't see a problem.
      - geofft 9y ago
        The problem is that "fork" means two different things at this point. Compare "FFmpeg developers fork FFmpeg" in the sense of "...and create libav" and in the sense of "...so they can submit pull requests." One is extremely newsworthy, one is extremely not. If you're posting something to HN, it's a reasonable assumption that readers will think you're posting a newsworthy thing as opposed to not.

anderskaseorg 9y ago

Anyone else think it’s dumb that you have to fork a repository just to submit a pull request? Why doesn’t GitHub let you do it in one command like ‘git push origin master:refs/pull/new’?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

useranme 9y ago

I don't know much about Swift. Has anyone written in it something they can demo? Can it write gui and web apps? What's the biggest problem it solves and how do you like the language?

viksit 9y ago

Can we change the title to “google forked the swift GitHub repo” or somesuch? The current one is rather misleading!

lamontcg 9y ago
Can we change the title to "google prepares a nothingburger"?

mastax 9y ago

Should change the title to "Google has a fork of Swift"

eonil 9y ago
Does it feel differently? "fork" as a noun and a verb? No offense, just a question. Because I'm not a native English speaker.

moocowtruck 9y ago

how is this news ... hey look software was forked on github today!

startupdiscuss 9y ago

Great news. Now if they can just make it an option on Android and Chrome and someone builds a front end and a back end framework we’re home free.

codesternews 9y ago

May I know why it's flagged? @Dan or some other person

Erwin 9y ago
Google has not in fact, forked Swift. So there's no news here, just FUD.

codesternews 9y ago

I will really kill google if he messes with my favourite language :(. Sorry for this language but I do not want it to be at google home. You guys do not respect others.

codesternews 9y ago

If Chris Lattner (Swift Creator) is behind this. I am more than ok, else I do not think this is the process. You should raise proposal to swift community and if it gets accepted you start working on it. Not other way around. You create fork and try to push and if they does not agree with you. You will say ok we are having our own fork. reply

sidcool 9y ago

Why is this flagged?

szatkus 9y ago
I guess that title is little controversial. For people unfamiliar with GitHub process it may sound like Google prepares their own version of Swift (which is not a case as explained in the top comment).

stablemap 9y ago

https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/930832426548436992 https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/930832426548436992 Swift at Google has enough folks working on it that we need a staging ground/integration point, and we decided it should be public.

apple4ever 9y ago

Can they make a MR to fix the terrible syntax?