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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> That's a bit of a weird assumption. Apple's statement was the the Swift code and standard library would be open-sourced. What is the 'best stuff' that we're not going to get?

I'd expect Foundation and other Cocoa stuff (Core Data and the like) will not be part of the package.

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Well... yeah, because Foundation and UIKit / AppKit is not part of the Swift stdlib?

Yes, but when people say "Swift" they are talking about the language, not Cocoa.

Unfortunately many of the the really nice things about working in Objective-C and Swift are actually parts of Cocoa. I imagine the language will feel a bit like you're in a straight jacket without them.

I think that's the crucial point. If they do not at least include things like networking, multithreading and file system access from Foundation then server-side Swift will either not happen for a long time or it will be very fragmented.

It's in Apple's advantage for server-side Swift to take off, and do so quickly and robustly.

It also makes little sense (nor is in character) for Apple to agree to open source Swift and not take a leadership role in the effort.

One step at a time...

Core Foundation is already open source and provides threads, networking, and file i/o.

Core Foundation is open source and has been for at least seven years.

As mentioned elsewhere, Core Foundation is open source (http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/CF/CF-635.19/), though IIRC only parts of it currently work on Linux. Calling Core Data "Apple's best stuff" is a serious stretch, if you have ever used Core Data :)

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