“Swift will be open source later this year”

Nice to see that Chris (Lattner) got his way. I chatted with him last WWDC right after the main Swift technical session, and he expressed the desire to open source it, but had no idea if he could get it through the powers that be.<p>Supporting the standard libraries on Linux is certainly a surprise, though.

I remember a thread on HN [1] from a few months ago talking about how apple was never going to do this. I&#x27;m so glad they were able to pull it off! Good for you, Apple!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8488808" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8488808</a>

I will surely be downvoted for speaking so off the cuff, but I haven&#x27;t really enjoyed swift so far. How has the general developer reception been to the language, not just with respect to obj-c, but also to java or any other turing complete language?

Ah, interesting. I&#x27;ve suddenly gone from &quot;Not caring at all about the existence of this language&quot; to &quot;Mildly intrigued.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s amazing what some opening of control will do.

Please for the love of all things holy please stop saying Swift would be great for Android or that Google is porting Go to Android. As an Android developer for the past four years I can assure you that there is zero evidence that Google is moving the Android FRAMEWORK to Go. There aren&#x27;t even any plans to support lambdas and Java 8. Also, pretty much everyone on the bleeding edge of Android is planning on moving to Kotlin. It has even more higher level and functional abstractions than Swift or Go, full interoperability with Java (even in the same file), and almost no performance hit.

This places Swift right along Golang and Rust as the new interesting language.

People who talk about swift compare it to Rust and Go. I can see how the syntax is to ObjC what Go is to C++. Else but that, in what way is Swift anything like Go or Rust?<p>To me (someone who does Lisp &amp; JS, so none of these all) go seems cool for concurrency and being &#x27;boring&#x27; (in a great way). Rust seems cool for being very robust and &#x27;safe&#x27; (or hard to screw up with), while still doing concurrency nicely and letting you code in high and low level.<p>Is there any ways that Swift is more than ObjC without [[[[all] the] square] brackets]? (nothing wrong with that, if you&#x27;re not into square brackets)

Swift on Rails, who&#x27;s first :) ? I suspect Heroku are working on preparing for an out of the box build pack, but I guess they don&#x27;t have access yet since it&#x27;s out late 2015. At least I hope so, looking for a better Ruby replacement but I still like Rails.

Much of the sentiment here is about how Swift will drive iOS developers to write APIs in the language. I think the inverse is much more fascinating and creates greater business benefit for Apple: If developers start using Swift for interesting or prominent projects outside of iOS, then that drives people to learn Swift outside of the Apple ecosystem. This means that the barrier to learning and building iOS apps drops, and Apple gains more, potentially experienced developers writing code.

Well whaddaya know, I like the direction this is going with both Apple and Microsoft.

Aside from graphics&#x2F;GUI programming; there is little advantage to Objective C or Swift.<p>The &quot;language&quot; may be &quot;open sourced&quot;; but will the important Cocoa implementations be open sourced?<p>It shouldn&#x27;t be to too tough to re-implement Swift; unless Apples starting suing people for doing it.<p>The exact meaning of Apples announcement needs some clarification.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Pm8P4oCIY3g" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Pm8P4oCIY3g</a> this is a talk by Joyant&#x27;s Bryan Cantrill where he make the case that announcing something is going to be open sourced in the future is bad and is an anti pattern.

To be clear: Apple promises they <i>will</i> open source Swift &quot;later this year&quot;. There&#x27;s no source yet.

Apple explicitly said they see Swift as a systems language... curious what people thing about that. Does it compete with C&#x2F;Rust, or is it just a pipe dream&#x2F;marketing message?

Hmm they said they wanted Swift used everywhere for the next 20 years, they&#x27;re going to make it open sourced and provide builds for iOS, Mac and Linux...but not Windows which is one of the largest operating systems in the world? I&#x27;m guessing they really don&#x27;t want it used everywhere. Though knowing Microsoft they&#x27;ll take Swift and implement support for it in Visual Studio.

&gt; Swift will be open source later this year, available for iOS, OS X, and Linux.<p>They&#x27;re doing Linux but not Windows? Is Windows not sufficiently important or maybe they just forgot to include Windows in the announcement?

Swift interfaces with C and Objective-C natively right? I can&#x27;t wait to see web servers written with it.

This is by far the most impressive news in this WWDC to me. Wouldn&#x27;t it be great if swift can break into the complexity of android development and bring simplicity and elegance in it!?

Funny, for years people said Microsoft was Copying Apple. We&#x27;ll never know but I can&#x27;t help thinking that Microsofts recent push to open source dev tools and languages at least made this happen sooner than it would have. It&#x27;s a great time to be a developer.

It also now supports Markdown in code comments

FYI, there is already a free cross-platform implementation of Swift called RemObjects Silver. It works with .NET, Java and Android.

Swift for me is what Python3 should&#x27;ve been. For me as a Python user, this development is huge.<p>I&#x27;ve been watching for the language to move to instead of Python3. Of Rust, Go, Swift and other new languages, Swift always seemed to me the most appealing language.<p>Being the 1st class citizen on iOS makes learning this for serverside development very appealing. An ideal server language that enables single language client-server applications possible with iOS.<p>Once the popular libraries start to drop Python2 support (which may take decades, who knows), this is a no brainer as the language to migrate to instead of moving to the much less robust Python3 ecosystem.

This could be a prelude to Apple offering their own Cloud services like AWZ or Azure, they need a standard backend Language that runs on traditional server OS&#x27;s.<p>Regardless being able to implement backend and apps in one language is huge.

Swift.net ? What? No Windows version? Why? ;)

Microsoft open sourced .NET and I don&#x27;t see queues of people willing to use .NET just because it&#x27;s open source.

And it runs on Linux.

I will love to see how Android apps will be written in Swift, not because its an Apple language, just because I didn&#x27;t like Java at all (don&#x27;t know the Oracle Java but the Java supported by Android lack of some features of an actual language).<p>Also the first challenge will be to build a library that implement all the Swift UI elements to Android (or vice versa) or better Google reinvent their UI or at least add more features and turns Android in a real MVC (bind the view with the controller).

Can someone explain what it means for a language like this to be open source?<p>I sort of get it for Python, means you can download the C files and mess with them.<p>But isn&#x27;t Swift written in like Assembly?

Nice, Swift just became 10x more interesting to me; especially since it&#x27;ll run on Linux. A Pythonesque statically typed language server-side could be handy.

Seeing as Objective-C has never took off on non Apple platforms (and is not any useful without Cocoa APIs) why would Swift be an exception?

So ... what will they call the Swift MVC framework?<p><i>Swift on Stilts</i>?

I&#x27;ll believe it when<p>a) I see it<p>b) Facetime becomes an open-standard like promised

I spent 10 minutes looking around for their github page haha but apparently it will only be open-sourced later this year. But the opening up of APIs for Linux is certainly very refreshing news.

I wonder where the official open source repo will be hosted?

Did they tell under what license? If they really want to mess things up, they would choose GPL2 without the &#x27;or later&#x27; part, but my guess would be BSD, but Apache and Apple&#x27;s Public Opensource License also are possible (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opensource.apple.com&#x2F;apsl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opensource.apple.com&#x2F;apsl&#x2F;</a>).

Swift will be a server side programming language!

I love how the biggest cheers in the past few conferences have been from open sourcing some major technology from a company.

Great, that Apple will open source Swift 2. I hope I can use an Win32&#x2F;64 community port on Windows 7 next year. Go, Rust, Swift, JavaScript and Julia - a really great time. Thinking back a few years, there were no new mainstream languages for about one decade (ca. 2000-2010).

In other news I have a macbook pro I really need to sell to buy a thinkpad.<p>Microsoft opened .NET, while apple is just releasing a language for its platform because mozilla and Google did too. While the latter opened sourced the languages.<p>Microsoft is just getting out of their walled garden, while Apple still has a much stronger one, which is worse because they tie their software with their hardware, which is a really dubious practice in my opinion.<p>I&#x27;m really starting to question the trial decision that made it illegal for developers to just run OSX on PCs. Either way we really need laws to prevent manufacturers to restrict other softwares from running on their hardware.<p>I slightly hated microsoft but always loved their OS and at the time I did not care abut apple. But now do I hate them.

Can&#x27;t wait to see more IDEs support Swift across operating systems.

This means developers don&#x27;t have to be on OSX to make iOS apps?

For game devs, hopefully we can look forward to Swift support in Unity then. C# and Booscript are fine, but I&#x27;d welcome a language that puts the tool closer to iOS development.

Hoping that at some point it gets ported to FreeBSD too!

What&#x27;s the state of the&#x2F;a standard library for Swift? When used on linux I hope I won&#x27;t have to use types prefixed &quot;NS...&quot;?

Thus that means I can use my Thinkpad to develop an application using Swift? Or will I miss some features? I don&#x27;t understand exactly ...

This is great!<p>I bet: * Swift will get ported to Android. * Swift will compete with Mono. * Xamarin will add Swift support to Mono.

Surprising, but good news. When Swift was originally announced, I suggested on HN that if they didn&#x27;t open source it, long term, it would go &quot;the way of Flash&quot; -- eventually, developers would abandon it in favor of more open platform technologies.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7851583" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7851583</a>

Apple also announced their intention to make FaceTime an open standard. Don&#x27;t hold your breath.

Question: Does open source expose vulnerabilities in the security of the language?

Any word on whether any of their standard APIs will also be released open source?

Meanwhile on Mountain View, &quot;here take Java 7 and be happy&quot;.

Open Source, this is indeed a very good start.

I will not read too much into this. It is a programming language used only to make iOS apps. I dont think this gives benefit to anyone.

Does swift have a good package manager&#x2F;library ecosystem? I think any new language should have this from the start.

How does it compare to Rust?

Ha ha, great video :-)

What a time to be alive :D

How to learn Swift?

This is great news.

Will Swift be an ISO or ANSI standard?<p>Consider that while Objective-C is open source, Objective-C 2.0 was produced without any effort at all at standardization.<p>I attended the 2008 WWDC. One of Apple&#x27;s engineers was demonstrating Objective-C++ and actually said &quot;You can freely mix objective-c and c++.&quot; I wanted to start screaming, maybe beat him senseless.<p>I&#x27;ve done quite a lot of Objective-C, and quite a lot of C++ but I&#x27;m still not sure I can figure out how to mix the two.

Any predictions how this can hurt RoR,nodejs and the others ?

let me see if i can find a shit to give about that...

Thank you Microsoft for this.

So, who&#x27;s gunna write the first HTTP library for Swift?

No, <i>Apple announces they intend to open source Swift at a future date.</i> That&#x27;s not the same as doing it.

I am very much against the way Cocoa &amp; Cocoa Touch work (a &quot;ViewController&quot; is NOT!!! a controller in the MVC sense), and Interface Builder makes me want to take a high powered rifle to Cupertino, but Swift is definitely a winner now that it&#x27;s going open source.<p>I rebuilt a dysfunctional OS X application that was ported from iOS (obj-c) from the ground up almost entirely in Swift last year, and <i>really</i> enjoyed working in swift. It&#x27;s worlds better than Objective C, and compares favorably with other modern languages like Go (which I also like and use quite a lot). It takes a minute and a bit of annoyance to get used to optionals, but that ends up being really nice for issues most languages let you shoot yourself in the foot on. Along with switch patterns, easy immutability, memory management, string handling, and Playgrounds&#x2F;REPL make it a really pleasure.<p>Even with that endorsement I couldn&#x27;t recommend it seriously for anyone without being cross platform &#x2F; open source. Now I can say I really think it&#x27;s worth learning.

My sentiment can be summed up as: &quot;Meh. It&#x27;s still Apple.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve never had a good experience with an Apple product.