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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
by 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 agoWelp. 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 agoApple 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 agoHow many years have to go by without Apple even talking about open-sourcing Swift before you consider it unlikely?
- mikeash 12y agoIf there's no news by this time next year I'll probably start to get fearful that they might keep it closed. But it's way too early right now. We're only a month or so after the first public release. As I recall, it took several months for ARM64 to show up, and that was a lot more finished than Swift currently is.
- rsynnott 12y ago> It just doesn't seem like a very Apple-ey thing to do. Well, clang...