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> I guess the whole point is to write cross-platform code, but is the .NET environment that much better than Swift/Xcode?

You said it all. The whole point is cross platform development.

People use Swift to develop apps for Apple products. Before Dot.net was made open source, people only used it to develop for Microsoft platforms.

The fact Dot.net is now crossplatform makes it possible for GNU/Linux and Mac users to consider it for development.

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So when will Swift be made open-source?

I am not going to make the same mistake twice and be tied down to a language (Objective-C) and private APIs (Cocoa, iOS, etc) which are useless outside of Apple's ivory tower.

I had always thought of C# and Mono as a potential cross-platform solution, but now that .NET is open-source and Microsoft are pushing it hard, even on Linux, it has become a viable one.

I suspect I am not the only Mac->iOS developer who is thinking along these lines.

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