Hacker News Reader

Comment by ra88it | Hacker News Reader

At the end of the article, the author gives several reasons why he won't be teaching Swift to students yet. He includes each of your points. (With the assumption that eventually they will be moot.)

View on HN

Nope.

He lists that there's no Windows IDE, which is far from being able to run the program everywhere and using whatever I want to use to build it (as I have said it). I also think that .NET languages (like Visual Basic .NET and C# .NET) are not a good starting language, even though one of them was my starting language thanks to my high school and my college (both taught me Visual Basic .NET for one year). Plus, he states that Swift is open source at the moment, which, as far as I know, is not true. He didn't mention any of those three points I made.

EDIT: Replaces .NET with .NET languages.

Once it's open source, isn't it logical to conclude that there will be open source runtimes that run on non-Apple products? Give it a year or so.

Think of it this way: there's iTunes on Windows, but is it actually useful? In reality, it's buggy as hell, slow as hell, quite resource-hungry and requires hundreds of megabytes to install it (even though it's nothing more than a music player capable of being connected to other devices). And Windows version of iTunes contains a Windows port for years.

Now, if Apple actually released the code of its Windows port of iTunes, will Apple actually care about it enough to accept the contributions from the community and make the community feel welcome? Will iTunes on Windows drastically improve as the time goes on? Will developers on other platforms accept it and use it for their products? How well does it behave when compared to other programming languages? There are too many unknowns.

Although I'd love to see that future, I don't think that this will happen. In theory, releasing the code of something is all that is needed to do to make something actually useful. In reality, things are not that simple.

Not even a year, about a month. Swift for Linux will arrive with the release of Swift 2.0, which will coincide with the release of Xcode 7, which will coincide with the release of iOS 9 ... which will coincide with the announcement of the next iPhone, which should be around late September, as usual.

Hm, do you think it'll only take a month for it to be ported to Windows?

I'm not an LLVM expert, but Swift is an LLVM frontend, so once it's open source, I think it should work for the various backends?

Right now the issue is library support - swiftc can already just spit out LLVM IR: https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/issues/2427

The stdlib would be included in the open source release.

Linux boxes would fulfill "non-Apple product" though. Unixy programming languages like Swift and Python have always been weird on Windows.

Could you elaborate on Python being weird on Windows?

Python is a set of packages. On Windows, you're supposed to use a distribution, such as Anaconda.

Even then, building some of the fancier libraries (with native code) by hand is bit involved.

In fact, Anaconda works very well on Windows, as long as you don't require extreme latest versions of modules.

> I also think that .NET is not a good starting language

Well, that's sort of obvious, in that .NET is a platform for which many languages (VB.NET, C#, F#, Python, etc.) are available, not a language.

It came out wrong, but I was thinking about Visual Basic .NET and C# .NET. Not sure about the others since I never tried them. Thanks for pointing that out, I'll edit my comment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com