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Comment by kcorbitt | Hacker News Reader

So it looks like the language isn't open source and won't target non-Apple runtimes?

I'm not trying to troll, I just think that it's a pity that Apple tends to limit the ecosystem and applications of its otherwise-great languages. Building against LLVM ought to make it fairly trivial to make this cross-platform.

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Now that Microsoft has been open sourcing so much stuff I was expecting Apple to follow the wave and release Swift as open source too. It's a shame though.

I'm old enough to remember Apple suing Microsoft for "copying their look and feel". Open source is something Apple only does strategically - when they have to or it suits them - it is not part of the company's ethos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso....

> Open source is something Apple only does strategically - when they have to or it suits them - it is not part of the company's ethos.

What Fortune 500 (or even 5000) systematically open sources every piece of technology? Every company I can think of -- Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Amazon, LinkedIn, AOL, Craigslist, Oracle, -- selectively decides what to open source.

I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but Apple is far from alone in doing so.

None of them are 100% open or closed, but clearly some are more open than others.

more open? what a funny joke i ever heard. please define the meaning of the more, and at least tell who is the more open one.

Red Hat.

Yeh, I agree. I was surprised when they open sourced webkit. But like you said, it's strategic. I don't think they care that much about the browser. Their emphasis is on apps running in their ecosystem.

They didn't have a choice about webkit; it was a fork of KHTML, which was a part of KDE (and available under the terms of the GPL).

Actually, WebKit was a fork of KHTML, correct, but it is licensed under the terms of LGPL. One extra letter, but a world of difference. This is why they had to open source KHTML, but they could get away with not open sourcing Safari (if KHTML was licensed under the GPL, any app that linked against the library would need to be licensed under the GPL, too.)

Let's not forget that webkit when it was released was little more then a code dump - one big patch that had to be applied to KHTML.

Also "they didn't have a choice" sort of ignores that they did have the choice of not using khtml and wouldn't have, if its license could've been problematic for them.

You can see first chapter of the book here

http://imgur.com/a/AuzGw

I've uploaded it just now

Why I get down votes? It's a free book. People on other platforms can't access it.

Welcome to HN where it seems everyone disregards others work/opinions if they have any reasoning that may only make sense to them.

I'll get down voted for this, and it will be truly ironic.

But it will be worth it.

Bring on the Downvotes!

thanks for this. I clicked their link(on my less than a year old ~$2000 MBP) and it opened iBooks and sat there with a loading icon for minutes. My first and last experience opening iBooks.

Combine this with their OpenGL replacement ("Metal") and that pretty much kills any cross-platform at all doesn't it?

It's not too hard to write a graphic engine that abstracts out the graphics API, but it would have to be done in a language other than Swift...

Realistically all the Kits aren't (officially) portable anyway.

Is there anything to stop a independent implementation? Like C#/.Net and Mono?

Well if the core of the language is licensed and closed source (is it?) and they do not make a standard iso, it's really problematic to reimplement it in another platform. Both from a legal that from a technical pov.

Just look at the latest ruling on Oracle vs. Google using Java...

No point?

horrible adoption?

I can't even view the book about the language without having an Apple device or installing Apple software.

It's available online in html:

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...

I assume you'd need a developer account, though.

The book is ePub with no DRM. You don't need an apple device. You could download it on iTunes on windows, and read it with any ePub reader. if you don't want to install itunes i guess you could get a friend to email you a copy.

Open source or not, Swift will never be appealing for the world outside Apple's garden if it will be as intertwined with Cocoa as Objective-C currently is. It will be nice however to see how well Swift could be ported to Android.

There's no indications yet that it won't be. I suspect a large part of it will be part of a timed-release with their next merge to LLVM. But only Apple knows for sure.

Deleted comment

Different Swift language. That is a "parallel scripting language" for scientists and is written in Java.

That's a different Swift.

This link is for a previously existing Swift language.

This is only a bit of a bummer because I already expected as much.

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