
Google forked Swift - eonil
https://github.com/google/swift
======
lexlash
Hi! I’m one of the engineers on this. We’ve got some work we’re collaborating
on - all of which is going upstream - and we wanted a shared place to stage it
while we prepare PRs. I’ll be pushing a statement to our fork tomorrow.

(I’m personally working on Bazel rules and contributions to lib/Syntax. If you
find that exciting, please get in touch! :)

~~~
philwelch
Thank God. Otherwise this seemed like a very Microsoft/Java strategy.

~~~
eonil
I also worried having two different languages -- Google Swift and Apple Swift.

~~~
pvg
Maybe you should have tried to find out what this is about before posting it
with a completely made up title?

~~~
veidr
It's not a "made up title", Google did in fact fork Swift on GitHub. That
doesn't mean anything in an of itself, thousands of people/organizations have
also done so, but it's mildly interesting since it's Google, and because it
was posted here, we now know why.

Don't see a problem.

~~~
geofft
The problem is that "fork" means two different things at this point. Compare
"FFmpeg developers fork FFmpeg" in the sense of "...and create libav" and in
the sense of "...so they can submit pull requests." One is extremely
newsworthy, one is extremely not. If you're posting something to HN, it's a
reasonable assumption that readers will think you're posting a newsworthy
thing as opposed to not.

~~~
eonil
How do you know the intention of a fork without their own explanation? It was
unknown at the point of posting, and posting title is still technically valid.

This posting let you know their intention. Isn't it newsworthy?

~~~
detaro
"Google employees are contributing to another project" is not newsworthy, no.
Neither is them creating a github fork unless you have evidence that they do
not intend to use the fork for the main reason people create GitHub forks:
contributing.

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DannyBee
This is being used as a staging place for putting patches so they can be
turned into pull requests, nothing more. Sorry to bust any conspiracy
theories.

(You can see this happens on >100 of the swift forks :P)

~~~
bobajeff
This still leaves open speculation for why Google developers are working on
Swift.

~~~
DannyBee
I guess that's true, so i'll be explicit about that too: These Google
developers are working on Swift because they are part of a team that supports
internal-facing IOS tooling.

(there really is nothing down this rabbit hole, FWIW)

~~~
bobajeff
Oh, that's way less exciting than what I was thinking. Thank you Mr. Bee for
that bubble burst.

~~~
DannyBee
One thing to realize, if you don't already, is that we have come to accept
that everyone notices everything we do on github at this point (and further,
we assume that people look to see what googlers are doing outside the google
org as well, and that pretty much everything placed on github will leak, and
...)

If we were trying to keep something major under wraps, this would be an
exceptionally bad way of achieving that.

The public docs we have even show that we discourage private github repos for
various reasons. Our general internal answer would be "don't stage it on
github at all unless you are willing to see it leak"

------
geofft
Google corporate policy, to the best of my knowledge (I do not and have never
worked for Google but I asked lots of questions when evaluating an offer), is
that it's significantly easier to let Google retain copyright on your open
source work, and if it's on GitHub you have to host your repo at
github.com/google if Google retains copyright.

("Forks" with no code changes ending up at the top of HN, as if they signaled
a major shift in corpprate strategy, are an excellent example of why I think
this is a bad policy. For all we know some Google employee PR'd a typo fix
they noticed one weekend and has since deleted the branch.)

~~~
DannyBee
Google's policies are actually mostly open too, so you don't have to guess :)
(they are linked from the open source page).

They are now a bit out of date, a few things have been simplified/relaxed
(generally, the goal is as little process as possible).

Then again, people also like to super-duper parse the words in the docs, which
are not really written to be parsed that way.

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anderskaseorg
Anyone else think it’s dumb that you have to fork a repository just to submit
a pull request? Why doesn’t GitHub let you do it in one command like ‘git push
origin master:refs/pull/new’?

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AceJohnny2
> _This branch is 48 commits behind apple:master._

Meh, looks more like a mirror.

May even have been accidental. Do you know how they decide what lands under
Github's google/ umbrella?

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nawtacawp
Perhaps this is the start of moving Android Apps to Swift.

Which, per rumor was considered last year:

"About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major
brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing
the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is considering making
Swift a “first class” language for Android"

[https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-
sw...](https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-swift/)

~~~
rainboiboi
That would be great news. Unification of mobile programming language.

~~~
rectang
That would be great for developers like you and me -- after all, our skills
are most valuable when they are portable. How much more can we get done if we
don't have to support multiple platforms?

However, the interests of vendors are diametrically opposed to our interests
as developers -- it is all about vendor lockin, and making it as hard as
possible for us to support competing platforms.

~~~
rtpg
I understand the theory, but in practice this means if you want to implement a
competing platform... you just need to write a Swift target!

Much easier for developers to go check out your platform.

More unification would likely also mean better abstraction layers across
platforms, meaning that competing platforms could rely on those abstraction
layers.

Think about how nice it is that most devices out there are running at least a
flavor of Unix. You have a base-level expectation of how things can be
integrated. There are of course differences, but generally if you write your
stuff in a certain way you can use it almost everywhere!

And for those who don't want to work on Unix, all you need is a compatability
layer to bring over some useful tools. Just get that C compiler up and running
and you get a lot of stuff too!

The reason this is different from other forms of platform lock-in is that
ultimately things like programming languages don't cover the full stack, so
there are "obvious" places where you can swap either your language, the stuff
underneath, or the stuff above it.

------
viksit
Can we change the title to “google forked the swift GitHub repo” or somesuch?
The current one is rather misleading!

~~~
lamontcg
Can we change the title to "google prepares a nothingburger"?

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stablemap
[https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/930832426548436992](https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/930832426548436992)

 _Swift at Google has enough folks working on it that we need a staging ground
/integration point, and we decided it should be public._

------
useranme
I don't know much about Swift. Has anyone written in it something they can
demo? Can it write gui and web apps? What's the biggest problem it solves and
how do you like the language?

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revelation
There are some 1500 people in the Google organization, so presumably just one
of them pressed fork and selected the org accidentally. GitHubs UI makes this
super easy.

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startupdiscuss
Great news. Now if they can just make it an option on Android and Chrome and
someone builds a front end and a back end framework we’re home free.

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codesternews
If Chris Lattner (Swift Creator) is behind this. I am more than ok, else I do
not think this is the process. You should raise proposal to swift community
and if it gets accepted you start working on it. Not other way around. You
create fork and try to push and if they does not agree with you. You will say
ok we are having our own fork. reply

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mastax
Should change the title to "Google has a fork of Swift"

~~~
eonil
Does it feel differently? "fork" as a noun and a verb?

No offense, just a question. Because I'm not a native English speaker.

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codesternews
May I know why it's flagged? @Dan or some other person

~~~
Erwin
Google has not in fact, forked Swift. So there's no news here, just FUD.

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incadenza
Maybe for work on their own iOS products? Strange.

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apple4ever
Can they make a MR to fix the terrible syntax?

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moocowtruck
how is this news ... hey look software was forked on github today!

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kvirani
What does this mean in terms of their adoption / integration of the language?

~~~
nawtacawp
I only remember reading a small tidbit about this last year:

[https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-
sw...](https://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/04/07/google-facebook-uber-swift/)

"Google is said to be considering Swift as a ‘first class’ language for
Android"

"About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major
brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing
the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is considering making
Swift a “first class” language for Android"

~~~
revelation
They integrated Kotlin with the very recent 3.0 version of Android Studio.

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sidcool
Why is this flagged?

~~~
szatkus
I guess that title is little controversial. For people unfamiliar with GitHub
process it may sound like Google prepares their own version of Swift (which is
not a case as explained in the top comment).

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kcoul
What the fork!

~~~
nvr219
oh ho ho ho ho

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codesternews
I will really kill google if he messes with my favourite language :(.

Sorry for this language but I do not want it to be at google home.

You guys do not respect others.

