8 ms·
I remember a thread on HN [1] from a few months ago talking about how apple was never going to do this. I'm so glad they were able to pull it off! Good for you,
by LesZedCB 11y ago
I remember a thread on HN [1] from a few months ago talking about how apple was never going to do this. I'm so glad they were able to pull it off! Good for you, Apple!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8488808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8488808
- chc 11y agoThey haven't pulled it off yet. They've just finally stated that they intend to do so, not actually done it yet. Prior to this, they hadn't even said it was on the table. So, progress, but they still haven't pulled it off.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- abuzzooz 11y agoThey said it will happen by the end of 2015.
- chc 11y agoWhich is still not "pulling it off", which is my point.
- artursapek 11y agoI think the "pulling it off" here is coercing their megacorp organization into tolerating the idea of open-sourcing something they poured so much time and money into developing. This is also why people have been celebrating Microsoft open sourcing things recently.
- brudgers 11y ago"By the end of the year" perhaps suggests that Microsoft got out in front and Apple's hand has been forced into changing their roadmap. I suspect that Apple will struggle with to support cross platform development beyond tossing Swift over the transom. Supporting diverse execution environments is not their core competence historically.
- BigChiefSmokem 11y agoI think this is where companies like Xamarin and JetBrains can pick up the slack as they have with the Microsoft stack. As long as it's (legitimately) opened-sourced, of course.
- brudgers 11y agoXamarin and Jetbrains live in the enterprise market. It's hard to see Swift quickly gaining traction in that space.
- mitchty 11y agoIt also suggests that swift version 2.0 isn't out yet and they don't want to deal with open sourcing it until then or have to go through lawyers regardless. If you followed Chris Lattner on the dev forums he always gave the impression that they wanted it open source from the start but had bigger fish to fry. They reimplemented a ton of the compiler multiple times after finding bugs in the existing language specs. Don't read too far into this that microsoft forced anything. For one, we'll never know and this is at best conjecture. As for supporting diverse execution environments, I'd argue llvm/clang/webkit proves otherwise. Granted they're not "supporting" it in the sense that they're selling support for it but I'm not sure exactly who would meet your criteria right now.
- jokr004 11y agoWhich is not a very interesting thing to gripe over.. there's nothing wrong with being excited about the announcement, why don't we stop with the pedantry?
- chc 11y agoThere is nothing wrong with being excited about the announcement, but that 1) that isn't what the headline indicated (it's since been changed, but at the time it was something very close to "Apple has open-sourced Swift!"), and 2) the comment I was replying to said Apple had "done it," which seemed to be responding to the inaccurate headline. I think most people involved in software would realize that the distinction between plan and implementation is extremely important.
- jokr004 11y agoSurely any reasonable person would recognize that it looks like swift will be open sourced, barring something unexpected.. You're nitpicking at someones choice of words and not adding anything valuable to the conversation.
- chc 11y agoI sincerely do not think "They pulled it off" versus "It looks like they will do this sometime in the next six months" is nitpicking somebody's choice of words. The difference between the two is not a minor nuance, it's a large practical difference, and I don't think people would necessarily understand the latter meaning from the former. When I first saw this thread, I certainly thought Apple had actually open-sourced Swift, as both the headline and the comment I was replying to said so. Then I looked at the linked page and saw it had not happened, so I corrected this materially important piece of information.
- jokr004 11y agoThe headline and the direct quote from apples website say "Swift will be open source later this year".. I don't think anyone in this thread is trying to say anything to the contrary. Certainly the decision to open source swift has been "pulled off", perhaps that's what LesZedCB was referring to.. who knows? Who bloody cares? It's very much not important.
- jsz0 11y ago> Which is still not "pulling it off" Honestly if you're that nervous and scared of what might happen in the future there's probably nothing Apple (and most other companies) can possibly do to comfort you. Probably better for you to avoid the potential pain and skip this one.
- josteink 11y agoThey said they would make facetime an open standard. Still waiting.
- erifneerg 11y agoApple loses Facetime patent lawsuit. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114
- mooreds 11y agoHere's a story about facetime: http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/facetime-open-standard-never-happened/2012-12-06 http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/facetime-open-standard-...
- chc 11y agoAre you sure this is why Apple went radio silent? Even if Apple was somehow prevented from publishing the standard (I don't see how a patent would prevent them from doing so, but whatever), that doesn't explain why they couldn't just say so.
- mooreds 11y agoI am not sure--definitely don't have any real knowledge about this issue. I was just looking for any info about the facetime issue and that came up in the search results.
- 72deluxe 11y agoLet's hope this waiting has not caused your Facetime to be Faceache!
- LesZedCB 11y agoYeah, but calling it in the keynote is a pretty hard thing to back off from. I don't think they will. Hopefully it'll stay on schedule though!
- X-Istence 11y agoThe same was said about FaceTime... http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/facetime-open-standard-never-happened/2012-12-06 http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/facetime-open-standard-... Sadly, this never came to fruition, supposedly due to legal complications. Since they own Swift, and the underlying compiler infrastructure this may be simpler to pull off.
- ohitsdom 11y agoFaceTime was my first thought, too. An awesome promise that failed to deliver. It'll be really interesting to see if a video chat format ever becomes a standard, or if we're all forced to keep accounts with multiple vendors for interoperability (skype, hangouts, facetime, etc).
- Sanddancer 11y agoWebRTC is works under Firefox and Chrome, and is standardized.
- jallmann 11y agoWebRTC services are still, for the most part, isolated silos. There is no effort made to federate or interoperate between services. For that, you want something like SIP or XMPP/Jingle.
- Sanddancer 11y agoWhile true, my point was more that there /are/ standardized ways of doing that, and there is no barrier to apple working on and/or with standards bodies to discuss any concerns they have with WebRTC, SIP, etc.
- shawkinaw 11y agoI would argue that the biggest challenge of open-sourcing Swift was getting the go-ahead, not the actual mechanics of doing it. So from that point of view, they have pulled off the hardest part.
- zamalek 11y ago> a few months ago talking about how apple was never going to do this I would have definitely participated in the hate if I had seen that thread, all I can saw now is: bravo Apple! More of this please!
- higherpurpose 11y agoOr Apple saw that and decide to change its mind. Sometimes companies change their minds this way, like how Microsoft changed its mind on the banning of DVDs for Xbox, even though they never "officially" said they would do that before the announcement of the Xbox One, but it was strongly "rumored" they would do that. I'm sure that's what they intended, but the outrage was too big to let it be.
- addandsubtract 11y agoApple is never going to send me a free MacBook Pro and Thunderbolt display. Never.
- untog 11y agoThey could have also been influenced by MS open sourcing .NET - it's difficult to compete if you don't keep up.
- rsynnott 11y ago... Yes, Apple makes most of its decisions on open sourcing stuff based on reading HN. Of course.