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Comment by darthgoogle | Hacker News Reader

Well, let's just wait and see, because frankly, I'm tired of reading marketing fluff like "We can’t wait to see what you build!".

After years in the making (which means plenty of time to think of an answer), one of the most important questions still hasn't been answered, and not even mentioned on the blog.

Namely, will Swift be open-source and submitted to standards bodies? Will key libraries also be released?

If I make an investment to learn Swift, what are the chances that I can take this knowledge and use it outside of the Apple ecosystem? Or is Swift destined to follow the fate of Objective-C and be completely useless outside of Mac/iOS apps?

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I'm choosing to take this as gospel:

https://twitter.com/mxweas/status/474581160454942721

> Max Weisel: Swift will be open source with the release of iOS 8 :)))

https://twitter.com/mxweas/status/474589964823306240

> Max Weisel: Asked at the labs

I may yet be disappointed but I'm expecting them to open source it after release as they do with the other LLVM changes they make.

I think it could work with anything based on C libraries (C++ linkage sounds a bit trickier) but it has been very much designed to operate with the Obj-C libraries.

It might be that Haskell is a language to learn and may help you develop functionally if you switch to Swift later. There isn't that much to learn about Swift itself really.

Their lack of transparency on this matter sucks, but at least they haven't committed to making it proprietary: http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-June/073698....

Interesting thread. Not buying Chris's (with his Apple hat on) answer though.

The idea that you spend a few years to create a new language and have not even had a discussion yet about whether or not it will be open source is simply not credible.

Unless Swift was rushed to release because companies like Apportable were making too much progress and they wanted to herd developers back into the pens with new proprietary languages and APIs e.g. Metal.

Maybe they just don't want to deal with open sourced stuff for 1.0 Reference the arm64 stuff, I bet that the situation is that swift is in heavy flux (which if you follow Chris Lattner on the apple forums you realize they're changing things like crazy right now) and they just don't want to deal with people contributing to something that isn't quite ready. They already committed to saying they will introduce breaking changes in future releases. Maybe the whole team just doesn't have the time to deal with it, who knows, lets wait. Its not like C# suffered by not being open source from the start.

I wouldn't put that past Apple. Remember the more we antagonize them the more likely their legal team might go "not worth the effort just keep it in house".

Have you ever worked at a company that open sources code? I mean it's fairly common, even VERY common that the devs are all for open sourcing the product but the legal department has not made a decision yet. Engineers move at an incredibly swift, no pun intended, pace but Lawyers tend to take glacial ages to decide anything. It's completely and totally credible that the legal department hasn't given their final ok on things, especially at a company like Apple and as large as Apple is.

How is "incredibly swift, no pun intended, pace" not intended?

It's an unnatural forced use of the term expressly for that purpose, expressly saying something is not exactly what it is, isn't in anyway accidental.

How is it unnatural moving at swift pace is a very common phrase. I can think of several times that I and others have said it.

Seems fairly transparent: members of the team would like to make it open source closer to the release, but they haven't made a decision yet and will likely do so once the 1.0 release is complete.

I did phrase that terribly. What I meant (and failed) to convey was that the most authoritative source of info on this topic was a post to a relatively obscure LLVM-related mailing list, rather than any sort of official announcement. However, I shouldn't have said "lack of transparency", because the devs could have chosen to not make any sort of public statement at all.

Considering that Swift is built on LLVM, it's not surprising that a comment was made there. It's also probably where an announcement of it being open source would be made (and now probably the Swift blog).

I've heard from various people that any decision on open source wouldn't happen until after 1.0 since the language syntax decisions haven't been nailed down yet.

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