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Hard to say, as yet. I'd expect it to be pretty open in the end, though; they're using LLVM and the Objective C runtime, both of which are open and usable on ot
by matthewmacleod 12y ago
Hard to say, as yet. I'd expect it to be pretty open in the end, though; they're using LLVM and the Objective C runtime, both of which are open and usable on other platforms. I guess we'll see if they release the compiler.
- MaysonL 12y agoThis will almost certainly happen when Xcode 6 gets released publicly.
- kristianp 12y agoObject C was created through changing the GCC and hence had to be released as open source due to the licensing of GCC (I believe) [1]. Swift is an apple invention and I would predict that they have no intention of releasing source code of it for availability on other platforms. Apple is a very closed ecosystem. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C#Popularization_through_NeXT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C#Popularization_thro...
- matthewmacleod 12y agoYou are correct that the initial NextStep implementations of Objective C extended GCC. However, GCC is not longer used by the Apple toolchain. They could easily close up their work on Clang and LLVM, and haven't. Further, they're obviously still contributing - they've recently added their ARM64 backend to LLVM. The Apple software ecosystem isn't particularly closed. Much list iOS and OS X, they're based on a pretty open foundation, with proprietary libraries on top.