Apple’s Swift iOS Programming Language Could Soon Be in Data Centers

wired.com

6 points·Jerry2··3 comments

There seem to be a lot of inaccuracies in this article:

"APPLE CREATED THE new Swift programming language as a better way of building apps for the iPhone, and it was a welcomed thing."

Swift was, from the beginning available for both iOS and MacOS (leaving the iPad and iPod aside).

"The language that drives most iPhone apps today—Objective C—is not open source, and for the most part, it remains limited to Apple devices. "

Objective-C (in gcc) is open source, has been for a long time, and has been used in the GnuStep project for a long time.

"But Apple has said it will soon open source Swift, freely sharing the underpinnings of the language with the world at large. Once that happens, Stephens and the rest of the developer community can port the language onto other operating systems, including Linux, which dominates the modern data center."

Apple announced that it would provide a Linux port as part of the open source version.

I'm surprised to see so many errors in a Wired article.

Agreed. It is the Cocoa Frameworks that are actually the closed source components in all of Apple powered OS'es. Despite the articles' inaccuracies, it would still be very interesting to see Swift being used in other platforms for both server-side activities and in mobile apps.

Personally I'm most excited about Swift for general purpose development, including desktop, embedded and scientific programming.

It's one of very few languages that can challenge C++ as a systems language, due to efficiency and lack of garbage collection.

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