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Comment by phaedryx | Hacker News Reader

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phaedryx

First question that comes to mind: how open is this language?

(I can't find any references to it)

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Swift was developed internally at Apple.

In the intro of the book "The Swift Programming Language," which Apple just released on Itunes Book store, it says:

“Swift has been years in the making. Apple laid the foundation for Swift by advancing our existing compiler, debugger, and framework infrastructure. We simplified memory management with Automatic Reference Counting (ARC). Our framework stack, built on the solid base of Foundation and Cocoa, has been modernized and standardized throughout. Objective-C itself has evolved to support blocks, collection literals, and modules, enabling framework adoption of modern language technologies without disruption.”

Book is available here:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/swift-programming-language/...

Extremely closed, at least at the moment. Can't even read the language reference without Apple products.

You can actually read the language reference with a "standard browser":

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

Hmm, can't seem to change page in Chrome. In Firefox, it works slightly better but still doesn't really. I'm guessing it only works on Safari? How can they release a language and not have proper documentation that is accessible by anyone?

It'd be great if someone could get the book, convert it to PDF and post it online.

I can switch pages in both Chrome and Firefox.

ePub[1] has been posted elsewhere in this comment thread.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7835994 (accidentally said PDF instead of epub before)

PDF - https://www.dropbox.com/s/wkxqv1zcgrg28m4/The%20Swift%20Prog...

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Apple Inc., with the following exceptions: Any person is hereby authorized to store documentation on a single computer or device for personal use only and to print copies of documentation for personal use provided that the documentation contains Apple’s copyright notice.”

Works fine here in FireFox 29.0 on Solaris no less.

Doesn't change pages when I click on stuff here.

Works for me in Chrome

Works here in Firefox.

I had to open things in a new tab (in chrome) to see them (odd, but it worked?)

Edit: Seems to be working now anyways :).

Hard to say, as yet. I'd expect it to be pretty open in the end, though; they're using LLVM and the Objective C runtime, both of which are open and usable on other platforms. I guess we'll see if they release the compiler.

This will almost certainly happen when Xcode 6 gets released publicly.

Object C was created through changing the GCC and hence had to be released as open source due to the licensing of GCC (I believe) [1]. Swift is an apple invention and I would predict that they have no intention of releasing source code of it for availability on other platforms. Apple is a very closed ecosystem.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C#Popularization_thro...

You are correct that the initial NextStep implementations of Objective C extended GCC.

However, GCC is not longer used by the Apple toolchain. They could easily close up their work on Clang and LLVM, and haven't. Further, they're obviously still contributing - they've recently added their ARM64 backend to LLVM.

The Apple software ecosystem isn't particularly closed. Much list iOS and OS X, they're based on a pretty open foundation, with proprietary libraries on top.

This is my problem with the language. The language looks really nice, and the interactive environment too, but I have no apple device to use it on. I would like it if there was at least a compiler for Linux.

I have the same problem with using c#/.Net (outside of work), it isn't a language I want to use at home or want to deploy onto a server.

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