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Aren't they probably just holding off on open sourcing it until...it's finished. I know they've just shipped '1.0' but I think they're still making pretty big c

Aren't they probably just holding off on open sourcing it until...it's finished. I know they've just shipped '1.0' but I think they're still making pretty big changes.

chc 12y ago
What's the last programming language you can think of that was really "finished" in any sense besides "shipped an X.0 version"? "When it's completely finished" is essentially synonymous with "when it's dead."
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  I understand that but it's only been available to the public for a few months. Apple were likely focussed completely on getting it ready for dev to use in iOS 8. That's where all their man power was. Give them some time.
  - chc 12y ago
    It's been 33 days since iOS 8 came out. It takes 30 seconds to tweet "Hey, we have some cleaning up to do before we open up Swift, but it's coming some time in the next two years!" They have not even expressed an interest in open-sourcing it. Any thought of Apple open-sourcing Swift at this point is pure fantasy, so the suggestion that we "give them some time" doesn't make any sense to me.
    - jkrems 12y ago
      They have expressed interest in open-sourcing Swift pretty much immediately after announcing it. Both on Twitter and later (?) on the LLVM mailing list. No official Apple announcement and far from a guarantee that it will happen - but "they have not even expressed an interest" isn't true.
      - chc 12y ago
        Not unless you've seen something I haven't. Chris Lattner said that although he was personally interested in open-sourcing it, Apple had no intention of ever doing so at that time. To my knowledge, that is the last we ever heard of it
        jkrems 12y ago
        Maybe I'm crazy/misremembering. But other than the "we're focussed on polishing it first" I thought I also read something reaffirming an interest (not from Apple officially but from one of the devs) to open source. And the LLVM mailing list post also contains a pretty clear "a lot of us really want to open source this" statement. Maybe this is just a misunderstanding: I didn't mean to imply that Apple expressed "an interest" as in "officially announced an interest". That would be very un-Apple-like. They tend to either do or don't. What I meant is that voices out of the project said they'd like to open-source. Which at that level (compiler/low-level) seems to suggest that it's likely. Given Apple's track record in that area / on that level.
    - pvaibhav2 12y ago
      It might take only 30 sec to tweet about it, but with open-sourcing comes a lot of stuff to deal with: once it goes open, there will be forks and pull requests and what not. Apple probably isn't yet ready to do fully open development (like they do with LLVM) of Swift.
      - chc 12y ago
        Did you not actually read the comment you replied to? The entire point was that they haven't even said "We intend to open-source Swift once we're ready." The last we heard, they hadn't even considered open-sourcing it, like, ever. (To clarify for people who like to misread things, I did not just say "They expressly intend to never open-source it." I said that, last we heard, they had not even talked about ever open-sourcing it.)
        k-mcgrady 12y ago
        Why should they waste 30 seconds on that? To satisfy you? Very few people really care about this. If they say anything and then it takes longer to deliver than they thought those people will jump down their throat. Better to say nothing and announce when ready.
        chc 12y ago
        I think it's a little late in history to say that very few people care about open-source software. PS: Where did I ask for a timetable?
Karunamon 12y ago
Hard to say with Apple. Their record on openness and transparency isn't great. This would be akin to Microsoft open sourcing Visual Basic. Seeing Swift released would make my and a whole lot of other people's days, but honestly? I wouldn't hold my breath.
- aeturnum 12y ago
  I mean, didn't Microsoft open source Visual Basic[0]? Was that the joke? [0]http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/roslyn.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/roslyn.aspx
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    Welp. When I did some cursory googling for "visual basic open source", that page wasn't anywhere on my results. Now I feel like a fool. I'd still be very surprised if Swift got the same treatment. It just doesn't seem like a very Apple-ey thing to do.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      Apple has historically been pretty open at this level. Open sourcing, say, UIKit would be a shocking move on their part, but I'd argue that not eventually open-sourcing the Swift compiler would be equally shocking. For example, they've kept their LLVM contributions open source even though they wouldn't have to, they developed clang in the open, they released their ARM64 LLVM backend, and they've open sourced various low-level OS libraries like the Objective-C runtime and (most of) CoreFoundation.
      - chc 12y ago
        How many years have to go by without Apple even talking about open-sourcing Swift before you consider it unlikely?
        mikeash 12y ago
MCRed 12y ago
Seems likely. It's not like objective-c is closed to other people, and the extensions to Objective-C that Apple has made are open. Swift and Objective-C are based on LLVM, which Apple has supported since very early on, and which is open sourced itself. It would be kinda out of character for Apple (the real Apple not the boogeyman Apple which is mostly a straw man) to not release a programming language as open source. Hell, the core of OS X (and iOS) is open source... they've only kept the UI layer closed source (notice Google has not open sourced their platform- map reduce, page rank, everything related to source they kept closed source. They only open sourced Android to try and be the Netscape Navigator to Apples Internet Explorer (iOS). Note that like Android, Navigator was free. Only after netscape ended did it become firefox, which is open source. Google shares android source, but to be official "Android" you have to license it from google, and that comes with a lot of requirements. So, Android is more properly understood as free)
- chc 12y ago
  Nobody at Apple has expressed any intention to make Swift free. Zero. Zip. You might call this "out of character," but the actual actions that they've taken in the real world have been to make Swift proprietary and turn away requests to open it up. Those are the facts, not a "boogeyman."
  - 3JPLW 12y ago
    This is false. > "You can imagine that many of us want [Swift] to be open source and part of llvm, but the discussion hasn't happened yet, and won't for some time." - Chris Lattner, LLVMDev mailing list. http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-June/073698.html http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-June/073698....
    - chc 12y ago
      This is strange. You just quoted Chris Lattner saying Apple has no intention of making it open-source, but said it makes me wrong. Indeed, he confirmed that it hadn't even been considered at that time.
interdrift 12y ago
They are actually on 1.1 since yesterday jetpacksaway

Aren't they probably just holding off on open sourcing it until...it's finished. I know they've just shipped '1.0' but I think they're still making pretty big changes.

chc 12y ago

What's the last programming language you can think of that was really "finished" in any sense besides "shipped an X.0 version"? "When it's completely finished" is essentially synonymous with "when it's dead."

k-mcgrady 12y ago
I understand that but it's only been available to the public for a few months. Apple were likely focussed completely on getting it ready for dev to use in iOS 8. That's where all their man power was. Give them some time.
- chc 12y ago
  It's been 33 days since iOS 8 came out. It takes 30 seconds to tweet "Hey, we have some cleaning up to do before we open up Swift, but it's coming some time in the next two years!" They have not even expressed an interest in open-sourcing it. Any thought of Apple open-sourcing Swift at this point is pure fantasy, so the suggestion that we "give them some time" doesn't make any sense to me.
  - jkrems 12y ago
    They have expressed interest in open-sourcing Swift pretty much immediately after announcing it. Both on Twitter and later (?) on the LLVM mailing list. No official Apple announcement and far from a guarantee that it will happen - but "they have not even expressed an interest" isn't true.
    - chc 12y ago
      Not unless you've seen something I haven't. Chris Lattner said that although he was personally interested in open-sourcing it, Apple had no intention of ever doing so at that time. To my knowledge, that is the last we ever heard of it
      - jkrems 12y ago
        Maybe I'm crazy/misremembering. But other than the "we're focussed on polishing it first" I thought I also read something reaffirming an interest (not from Apple officially but from one of the devs) to open source. And the LLVM mailing list post also contains a pretty clear "a lot of us really want to open source this" statement. Maybe this is just a misunderstanding: I didn't mean to imply that Apple expressed "an interest" as in "officially announced an interest". That would be very un-Apple-like. They tend to either do or don't. What I meant is that voices out of the project said they'd like to open-source. Which at that level (compiler/low-level) seems to suggest that it's likely. Given Apple's track record in that area / on that level.
  - pvaibhav2 12y ago
    It might take only 30 sec to tweet about it, but with open-sourcing comes a lot of stuff to deal with: once it goes open, there will be forks and pull requests and what not. Apple probably isn't yet ready to do fully open development (like they do with LLVM) of Swift.
    - chc 12y ago
      Did you not actually read the comment you replied to? The entire point was that they haven't even said "We intend to open-source Swift once we're ready." The last we heard, they hadn't even considered open-sourcing it, like, ever. (To clarify for people who like to misread things, I did not just say "They expressly intend to never open-source it." I said that, last we heard, they had not even talked about ever open-sourcing it.)
      - k-mcgrady 12y ago
        Why should they waste 30 seconds on that? To satisfy you? Very few people really care about this. If they say anything and then it takes longer to deliver than they thought those people will jump down their throat. Better to say nothing and announce when ready.
        chc 12y ago
        I think it's a little late in history to say that very few people care about open-source software. PS: Where did I ask for a timetable?

Karunamon 12y ago

Hard to say with Apple. Their record on openness and transparency isn't great. This would be akin to Microsoft open sourcing Visual Basic. Seeing Swift released would make my and a whole lot of other people's days, but honestly? I wouldn't hold my breath.

aeturnum 12y ago
I mean, didn't Microsoft open source Visual Basic[0]? Was that the joke? [0]http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/roslyn.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/roslyn.aspx
- Karunamon 12y ago
  Welp. When I did some cursory googling for "visual basic open source", that page wasn't anywhere on my results. Now I feel like a fool. I'd still be very surprised if Swift got the same treatment. It just doesn't seem like a very Apple-ey thing to do.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    Apple has historically been pretty open at this level. Open sourcing, say, UIKit would be a shocking move on their part, but I'd argue that not eventually open-sourcing the Swift compiler would be equally shocking. For example, they've kept their LLVM contributions open source even though they wouldn't have to, they developed clang in the open, they released their ARM64 LLVM backend, and they've open sourced various low-level OS libraries like the Objective-C runtime and (most of) CoreFoundation.
    - chc 12y ago
      How many years have to go by without Apple even talking about open-sourcing Swift before you consider it unlikely?
      - mikeash 12y ago

MCRed 12y ago

Seems likely. It's not like objective-c is closed to other people, and the extensions to Objective-C that Apple has made are open. Swift and Objective-C are based on LLVM, which Apple has supported since very early on, and which is open sourced itself. It would be kinda out of character for Apple (the real Apple not the boogeyman Apple which is mostly a straw man) to not release a programming language as open source. Hell, the core of OS X (and iOS) is open source... they've only kept the UI layer closed source (notice Google has not open sourced their platform- map reduce, page rank, everything related to source they kept closed source. They only open sourced Android to try and be the Netscape Navigator to Apples Internet Explorer (iOS). Note that like Android, Navigator was free. Only after netscape ended did it become firefox, which is open source. Google shares android source, but to be official "Android" you have to license it from google, and that comes with a lot of requirements. So, Android is more properly understood as free)

chc 12y ago
Nobody at Apple has expressed any intention to make Swift free. Zero. Zip. You might call this "out of character," but the actual actions that they've taken in the real world have been to make Swift proprietary and turn away requests to open it up. Those are the facts, not a "boogeyman."
- 3JPLW 12y ago
  This is false. > "You can imagine that many of us want [Swift] to be open source and part of llvm, but the discussion hasn't happened yet, and won't for some time." - Chris Lattner, LLVMDev mailing list. http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-June/073698.html http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-June/073698....
  - chc 12y ago
    This is strange. You just quoted Chris Lattner saying Apple has no intention of making it open-source, but said it makes me wrong. Indeed, he confirmed that it hadn't even been considered at that time.

interdrift 12y ago

They are actually on 1.1 since yesterday jetpacksaway