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Object 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 invent

Object 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 ago
You 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.