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Comment by jerluc | Hacker News Reader

I could be wrong, but I believe the parent is referring to the inability for a "vibrant community" to maintain Swift as a language implementation (instead of Apple), which is very different than Ruby. There's no doubt in my mind that there will be swarms of people developing with the language, but AFAICT, we'll mostly only see Apple developers working on the language itself.

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>There's no doubt in my mind that there will be swarms of people developing with the language, but AFAICT, we'll mostly only see Apple developers working on the language itself.

Well, it's not like there's a "vibrant community" working on Ruby either.

AFAIK, the core developers are Japanese ( http://rubycoreteam.heroku.com/ ) and the core communication and decisions is mostly opaque to outsiders, and new language stuff mostly comes in bunches pre-formed.

As opposed say to Python and the PEPs discussion, PHP etc.

I entirely disagree. As most all open source projects, Ruby has a set of core contributors, but is clearly open to community contribution, as can be seen from their Git repo's history (https://github.com/ruby/ruby/network). And no, core communication and decisions are NOT opaque to outsiders, as is the usual case with most open source software (Google groups, mailing lists, IRC channels, etc). And lastly, language features and design is a product of the RubySpec, which is itself a Git repo for people to contribute to possible language design/syntax/core libraries for Ruby VM implementors to introduce (https://github.com/rubyspec/rubyspec/).

also, isn't swift intimately tied to Cocoa & co?

Even if apple made great strides in open sourcing the language, compiler etc, I doubt we'll ever be able to run it on anything other than OSX/iOs.

The swift API, not necessarily the language. No more than obj-c is at least. With the support for swift to call obj-c code, if they release an implementation it might be interesting to see where projects like Etoile can take things.

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