
Swift is Open Source - psuter
https://swift.org/
======
ruddct
A lot of folks to thank at Apple right now, can't wait until all of this
propagates so we can take a look at what's new in Swift 3. Two thoughts:

\- VERY happy to see the open sourcing of much of the Foundation libraries
(which includes strings, dates, networking primitives, concurrency/task
queues, I/O, etc). It'll provide a very strong start and make working with
Swift immediately productive.

\- Holy crap, there's a package manager. This has been sorely needed since
about day one of Swift development, glad to see that it's been a priority as
part of the effort to open source!

~~~
mayoff
It doesn't look like they've opened any of the existing Foundation framework
we all know and love and that's written in Objective-C. The swift-corelib-
foundation repo contains a bunch of .swift files, and those contain lots of
calls to NSUnimplemented().

The Core Foundation stuff (included in swift-corelib-foundation) has been open
for a while:
[http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/CF/](http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/CF/)

~~~
gilgoomesh
The Foundation stuff is a complete Swift re-implementation of Foundation
(fairly impressive goal) and is still in-progress (basic classes like NSArray
and NSData look complete but none of NSURLConnection is implemented). They are
targeting Swift 3 to have them complete. As the Core Libraries project page
says:

"These libraries are part of the work towards the future Swift 3 release. They
are not yet ready for production use, and in fact are still in the earliest
stages of development"

~~~
vlozko
NSURLConnection is deprecated in iOS 9 so I won't be surprised if they choose
not to implement anything that's been deprecated.

------
nikon
Github repo is live now.
[https://github.com/apple/swift](https://github.com/apple/swift)

First ever commit found here
[https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/afc81c1855bf711315b8e5...](https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/afc81c1855bf711315b8e5de02db138d3d487eeb)

~~~
thecodemonkey
It's really interesting that they decided to retain the full history! It also
gives away some information about the initial contributors and the timeframe
of when they started.

~~~
joeflow
I love it. I've never taken a compiler class so going through and reading all
the commits since day one is really fascinating. It's easy to see exactly how
the language and structure of the code base came to be. Super cool in my book.

~~~
dafrankenstein2
right!

------
jdub
Apache 2.0 License + Runtime Library Exception + copyright owned by the
contributor (i.e. no assignment or CLA) + good community structure and
documentation + code of conduct... well done, Apple!

~~~
acqq
Anybody knows what effects of the "copyright owned by the contributor" are in
the context of Swift's Apache license?

I guess the "good side" is that the lawyers of other companies probably like
when the code made by their programmers keeps being copyrighted by the
company. But it is still an Apache license, so they can't demand too much from
the users of the code.

Still, are there any negative aspects? Any imaginable danger?

Can the standard library have problems with (once in the future) having
different copyright holders for its different parts?

~~~
jdub
Not really.

Your typical corporate IP lawyer might feel queasy about the collective
copyright aspect, but so much of the open source world works this way now...
they can suffer in their jocks.

One important question they'll ask is: "Who can enforce the copyright and
licence?" (Which is when the subtle difference between joint and collective
copyright matters.)

Non-trivial contributions are made under the terms of the Apache 2.0 Licence,
so regardless of who owns the copyright, everyone operates under those same
terms.

One common rationalisation for copyright assignment is ease of relicensing,
should it be necessary. That's much less important when operating under the
terms of a permissive license.

~~~
w4
> _Your typical corporate IP lawyer might feel queasy about the collective
> copyright aspect, but so much of the open source world works this way now...
> they can suffer in their jocks._

This is a bad attitude if you want buy-in from large organizations. If you're
not worried about that, no problem, but if buy-in is your goal (and I'm sure
it's Apple's goal here) you can't just tell potential contributors to "suffer
in their jocks."

~~~
jdub
Sure, it's flippant, but do recall that the entire concept of open source
absolutely terrified IP lawyers not that long ago (and in some cases, still
does).

Lawyers who are too conservative to allow their company's developers to
contribute to open source projects (that they don't own) have a problem. Open
source is way beyond pussy-footing around just to make corporate lawyers feel
comfortable.

And seriously, if Apple can do it, why can't they?

------
practicalswift
Happy to see that my collection of Swift compiler crashes (see
[https://github.com/practicalswift/swift-compiler-
crashes](https://github.com/practicalswift/swift-compiler-crashes)) has been
part of the official Swift repo since September 2014:
[https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/e5ca8be1a090335d401cd1...](https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/e5ca8be1a090335d401cd1d7dfcf9b2104674d5b)
:-)

A previous HN thread about the swift-compiler-crashes project:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9020206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9020206)

~~~
Arjuna
Wow, congratulations, that's really cool! Speaking of errors, I remember
receiving the "Expression was too complex to be solved in reasonable time"
error when I was first implementing Catmull-Rom splines for calculating flight
paths in a game that I developed. I translated that to, "The math is making
the room spin up in here." Definitely the "coolest" error I've hit working
with Swift.

~~~
pa5tabear
I recognized the name Catmull from Steve Jobs biographies... lo and behold
you're talking about the Pixar President Edwin Catmull.

~~~
Arjuna
Indeed; that's him! Edwin Catmull [1], along with Raphael Rom [2], created the
Catmull-Rom spline.

It was perfect for the Galaga-like level in my game. I only need to define a
few control points to create a robust flight path for the enemy drones. The
cool thing about the Catmull-Rom algorithm is that the spline passes through
the control points.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Catmull](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Catmull)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Rom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Rom)

~~~
copperx
Curious -- were you implementing the drawing algorithm by scratch? or were you
using any libraries?

~~~
Arjuna
Thanks for asking... I used Apple's SpriteKit framework [1][2]. It's
essentially a 2D graphics rendering framework that primarily acts as an
abstraction layer for OpenGL ES. In addition, it also offers several other
"nice-to-have" features with regard to 2D game development (e.g., collision
detection, particles, physics, etc.)

Of course, you could do all of the above without SpriteKit. For example, for
all of the rendering, you would simply write everything directly in OpenGL ES.

There are also cross-platform options, like Cocos2d-x [3] and Marmalade [4].

Finally, if you've read this far, you might be interested in reading my
general thoughts and feelings from when I finished the game [5].

Cheers!

[1]
[https://developer.apple.com/spritekit](https://developer.apple.com/spritekit)

[2] [http://www.raywenderlich.com/category/sprite-
kit](http://www.raywenderlich.com/category/sprite-kit)

[3] [http://www.cocos2d-x.org](http://www.cocos2d-x.org)

[4] [https://www.madewithmarmalade.com](https://www.madewithmarmalade.com)

[5]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8888107](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8888107)

------
bamazizi
The programming language eco system is really improving rapidly and
efficiently. It seemed the developer's toolkit was limited by the languages
created 20+ years ago but within the last few years we're seeing a renaissance
in developer toolkits as well as development philosophies.

Languages like Go, Rust, and now Swift are not only great from almost every
aspect over the last generation languages like C, C++, Java, but a lot noobs
or scripting language developers are also converting to more low level
languages. So the barrier to pick up a lower level language and become
productive in it has really diminished.

Go has had a head start and introduced minimal simplicity. It's a
great/powerful language and almost everybody can pick it up quickly within a
few days. I wouldn't listen to people who dismiss the language for its lack of
"features" and have never written more than "hello world" in it.

Swift is "important" because of Apple & iOS. It has a much steeper learning
curve than Go and naturally it takes a few weeks of dedication to get
comfortable with it. However, once you overcome the introductory challenge
then you'll start to appreciate the language and its capabilities.

Already the job market for both languages are really high with higher than
average salaries. So learning/mastering both Go and Swift is the best decision
you can make.

~~~
justinhj
"learning/mastering both Go and Swift is the best decision you can make" is a
very bold claim.

In my area we use Go for some systems but found it scales badly from an
engineering point of view to larger more complicated systems, compared to
languages like Java and Scala. The JVM has much more mature tooling and
libraries too.

For mobile applications it will be a while until Swift is stable on Android,
so some of the cross platform languages would be a good choice. React Native,
Unity, Unreal for example.

~~~
SureshG
For android, we already have kotlin
([https://kotlinlang.org/](https://kotlinlang.org/)), which is very similar to
Swift and has 100% interoperability with java.

~~~
niutech
Better alternative is Groovy: [https://jaxenter.com/groovy-is-the-swift-
alternative-for-and...](https://jaxenter.com/groovy-is-the-swift-alternative-
for-android-107846.html)

~~~
seabrookmx
Better is very subjective.

They both solve a lot of the same problems, but lots of people will go for
Kotlin just for static typing.

~~~
niutech
Groovy 2.0 added static typing: [http://www.groovy-
lang.org/releasenotes/groovy-2.0.html](http://www.groovy-
lang.org/releasenotes/groovy-2.0.html)

~~~
seabrookmx
It added type checking ala. Hack and Typescript. It's optional, and doesn't
give you the same compile-time guarantees that a language with pure static
typing does.

Also, dynamic languages like Groovy take a performance hit. Static typed JVM
bytecode runs faster than dynamic bytecode.

Whether either of those are relevant to your application really depends, but
Kotlin definitely is going to gain some followers due to it's differences from
Groovy.

------
justplay
I still remember max howel tweet[1] in which he publicly said that we was
rejected by Google. Looking at his linkedin profile[2] , he was later hired by
Apple in August 2015. Now he is biggest[3] contributed to Swift package
manager. It is good to see that the person who has lot of experience in
handing Apple and package system is handing this stuff. I guess, things
happens for good.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768](https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768)

[2]
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxhowell](https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxhowell)

[3] [https://github.com/apple/swift-package-
manager/graphs/contri...](https://github.com/apple/swift-package-
manager/graphs/contributors)

~~~
Shebanator
Highly qualified people get rejected by google's interview process all the
time, so people shouldn't take it personally if they get rejected. google is
willing to miss out on good people occasionally because they believe they
can't fix the problem w/o mistakenly hiring more mediocre/bad people.

~~~
wutbrodo
Fully agree. I seriously don't understand the statistical illiteracy[1] that
drives people to take every instance of a (perceived) false positive or false
negative as a sign of an entire system's unsuitability. I guess a lot of
people just have problems with the concept of a counterfactual. Note that this
doesn't apply to people's reactions to their _own_ experiences, since it's
completely reasonable to have a bit of an emotional reaction to something like
getting rejected.

[1] I couldn't think of a better way to put this, but it's not quite the right
term, since you don't need any education in statistics to understand how
irrational these reactions are.

------
alblue
Fantastic news that Swift is now open-source, though it came about 4 hours too
late for my GotoBerlin presentation on Swift 2 Under the Hood (on SpeakerDeck
at [https://speakerdeck.com/alblue/swift-2-under-the-hood-
gotobe...](https://speakerdeck.com/alblue/swift-2-under-the-hood-gotober-2015)
if you're interested)

I've also open-sourced the SIL Inspector that I demonstrated
([https://github.com/alblue/SILInspector](https://github.com/alblue/SILInspector))
and written up a post on InfoQ covering the important points of this release

[http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/12/open-source-
swift](http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/12/open-source-swift)

~~~
steilpass
That was my first thought: Didn't Alex talk about that yesterday night. ;-)

------
ihuman
It looks like Apple is also releasing an official package manager for
swift.[1] I wonder how that will effect Cocoapods.

[1] [https://swift.org/package-manager](https://swift.org/package-manager)

~~~
ejdyksen
Also of note, the largest contributor to the package manager is Max Howell
(mxcl), the creator of Homebrew:

[https://github.com/apple/swift-package-
manager/graphs/contri...](https://github.com/apple/swift-package-
manager/graphs/contributors)

~~~
throwaway6497
The same guy who wasn't offered a job at Google because he didn't do well in
the interview (or was it code in the interview?)

~~~
jkyle
Google doesn't provide feedback on why they reject you. For example, you could
be the world's foremost expert on Erlang. But the department interviewing you
needs a C++ programmer.

You'd never know that was the reason. You'd just be notified that you weren't
called back for another interview and asked to please check back for more
positions in a few months.

~~~
rgovind
Actually, you can extract some info from the recruiters. Just ask them, tell
them you need it to prepare better next time, tell them you know the reason
but want to cross check etc. They will tell you

------
iheart2code
It's great to see them follow through with this. I remember when Steve Jobs
went on stage and said that FaceTime would be an open standard. Haven't seen
that happen yet.

~~~
w4
> _I remember when Steve Jobs went on stage and said that FaceTime would be an
> open standard. Haven 't seen that happen yet._

FaceTime has been the subject of multiple patent lawsuits, which is what has
prevented it from being opened.

See:
[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114)
and
[http://www.techzone360.com/topics/techzone/articles/2014/09/...](http://www.techzone360.com/topics/techzone/articles/2014/09/29/390008-apple-
sued-patent-infringement-concerning-facetime-software.htm)

~~~
fulafel
Why would this affect opening the protocol? Patents aren't about keeping
implementations secret.

~~~
mikeash
My understanding is that the patent nonsense forced Apple to transform
FaceTime from a peer-to-peer protocol into one that transmitted all data
through centralized servers, specifically Apple's servers.

That meant that if the goal was for interoperability, Apple had to either
provide server capacity for a bunch of other people's traffic, or they would
have had to come up with a way to federate the system.

Federation certainly could have been done, but that's a lot of sudden extra
growth in scope compared to just taking what they had and releasing it.

------
dangjc
Super excited! I will totally be exploring Swift for quantitative work. Julia
has been great so far, but a lack of good IDE tooling is making a large
codebase difficult to navigate and keep clean. Python has even less type
safety than Julia. Swift has a REPL! Go doesn't, and its lack of generics
makes writing most algorithms very limited (there isn't even a matrix 32
library, just 64 bit). Java has horrible native interfacing. C# is pretty
anemic on Linux. C++ has too many gotchas, slow compile, to feel productive.
Bonus: Swift libs will probably be very easy to deploy on both Android and
ios.

~~~
iso8859-1
You don't need an ecosystem? Swift does not have this, not for Linux at least.

~~~
masukomi
some of us get by just fine in happy ecosystems that exist outside of linux.

~~~
talnet
yeah most of us.

------
mwcampbell
Interesting that they rewrote the Foundation library in Swift for the open-
source release rather than open-sourcing the ObjC one and bringing along the
ObjC runtime. I wonder if this means they still believe the ObjC runtime and
Foundation library are still worth keeping proprietary, or just that this is a
step toward phasing out ObjC.

~~~
mayoff
They didn't rewrite most of Foundation in Swift, at least not yet. If you look
in the files, they are full of calls to NSUnimplemented().

~~~
mnem
Interesting to see what they do have and what they don't have:
[https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-
foundation/blob/mast...](https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-
foundation/blob/master/Docs/Status.md)

------
glenntzke
I find the number of typo PRs to be amusing. Makes me wonder if there's a mass
effort to slog through commented code just to jump into the contributor list.

Correct spelling is certainly good, but the interesting phenomenon is getting
a PR merged in a high-profile project - however slight the change - as a badge
of cool.

[https://github.com/apple/swift/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Ap...](https://github.com/apple/swift/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Apr+typo+)

~~~
wingerlang
Definitely to get the little achievement, me included. I wouldn't put it on my
resume but I guess it is a fun little thing to have.

~~~
jrumbut
Generally when I'm using a new framework, I like to scan the code to pick up
on style, undocumented features, etc. Sometimes this results in a few typo-
level pull requests.

I never though of this as being resume line item grubbing behavior, now I
can't decide whether to stop doing this or start putting it on my resume :)

~~~
sonthonax
This is what I end up using the GitHub online editor for.

------
mojuba
Just re-stating the obvious, but it's also interesting how GitHub has become
the default go-to of repos for everyone, like Google is for - well - googling.
Kudos to both GiHub and git, you are simply awesome.

------
hokkos
What kind of trolling is that ?

>I think we should use GPL v3 instead.

[https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/17](https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/17)

~~~
mei0Iesh
That issue changed my view of GitHub, and related things. I'd seen a few
animated gifs in other threads this past week, but it didn't really sink in
until this.

I used to hold scientists and programmers to a different standard than most
normal people, because it seemed like a certain level of advanced
understanding was necessary to build anything functional in those fields. But
I've since realized that special ability does not carry over into all areas of
life.

It feels like seeing a ghost. I'm embarrassed to be registered with GitHub,
and also to be human.

~~~
feelix
Whenever I pictured the kind of person who posted reaction gifs to a thread, I
imagined some 14 year old kid trying to be cool.

Now, seeing this on github, I can only spend a few minutes clicking on the
gif-poster's names and taking a glance at their code to see if they are
actually mentally retarded or 14, and leave mystified and horrified.

~~~
debrisapron
I'll take people who post reaction gifs over people who use "retarded" as an
insult.

------
insulanian
With open-sourcing C# and Swift, the era of major closed source programming
languages is now officially over.

~~~
SwellJoe
I think the make up of the web is an indication that that era has been over
for a decade or more, and it just took some people/companies a while to
realize it.

Proprietary languages, even ones backed by a behemoth like Microsoft or Apple,
could never really dominate the most important platform when facing off
against open competitors (even open competitors with no real money or power to
speak of).

------
sebastiank123
Great news! Coding in Swift is fantastic and I would love to see it coming to
more platforms, maybe even on servers. It could become a serious Javascript
competitor due to its elegant syntax, the type safety and speed.

~~~
Maultasche
I completely agree. I want to be able to write the core of an application
once, and then add on a UI for every platform I deploy it on (Windows, OS X,
Linux, iOS, Android, etc.). Currently, the only real options for doing this
are C/C++, and that's just no fun to do.

I'd love to have a higher level like Swift that can be easily ported between
platforms and connected to whatever development language/environment that is
commonly used on that platform.

I'm hoping that open sourcing Swift will allow something like this to happen.
It seems like Microsoft is already making moves toward making Swift
interoperable with .NET as a way of making it easier iOS developers to release
Windows phone apps, so I'm optimistic.

~~~
rhodysurf
You can do this with rust and go already by cross compiling which they both
make easier than C++ makes it.

------
inglor
Am I the only one who finds it odd that while pushing two high level but
performant languages (Objective-C and Swift) Apple wrote their Swift compiler
in C++?

~~~
titaniumdecoy
Why would Apple write a Swift compiler in Objective-C, a language that it is
in the process of phasing out in favor if Swift?

And of course it is not possible to write a Swift compiler in Swift before the
language exists.

So no, not odd at all. Quite logical actually.

~~~
fulafel
> of course it is not possible to write a Swift compiler in Swift before the
> language exists

No, but you can do a self-hosting port after you have a first rudimentary
compiler. Many compilers have been built like this. Some did it early in
language development with a purpouse built one-off bootstrapping compiler,
some did it after the language was somewhat stable (eg Go).

ObWP:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_%28compilers%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_%28compilers%29)

~~~
koko775
Some people I know previously asked this question to one of the Swift
developers. I believe the reasoning was along the lines of (very liberally
paraphrased/interpreted): Even aside from the problem of bootstrapping the
compiler's compilation to start, performant compilation on C++ is a very
mature and well-explored problem space. C++ already compiles on a ton of
systems, and maintaining a C++-to-Swift(bootstrap compiler)-to-Swift(final
compiler) compilation process is added complexity and invites repeated work.

From a language design point of view, the things needed to get a language to
the point where it could successfully and efficiently compile itself would
skew or re-order priorities in a much different fashion than if they were to
focus on building and iterating on an applications and systems language.

tl;dr: LLVM and Clang and their assorted toolsets do quite a bit of valuable
work; reinventing that to serve the language they're building is a feedback
loop is a downside that also removes some upside from the equation, too.

------
mingodad
Testing the binaries on ubuntu decompressed to to $HOME/swift and trying to
execute swift:

Welcome to Swift version 2.2-dev (LLVM 46be9ff861, Clang 4deb154edc, Swift
778f82939c). Type :help for assistance.

    
    
      1> help
    

opening import file for module 'SwiftShims': No such file or directory

    
    
      1>
    

I could not find any mention to environment variables that could be used to
override default locations, like SWIFT_LIBRARY_PATH or something like it.

~~~
i_don_t_know
Type ":help". That is, type <colon>help. The : is used to differentiate
between commands to the repl and swift code.

~~~
mingodad
Thanks I didn't noticed the colon, my fault.

But even after copying all to the default location /usr it still doesn't work:

swift swifthello.swift

<unknown>:0: error: opening import file for module 'SwiftShims': No such file
or directory

Also

swift -I/usr/lib/swift swifthello.swift

<unknown>:0: error: opening import file for module 'Swift': No such file or
directory

------
iheart2code
The more I think about this, the more I wonder how existing third-party
libraries will respond. Similar to Android and Java, I'd imagine we'll start
seeing "vanilla" Swift libraries crop up that only use public/standard
libraries and can work on iOS/OS X apps as well as open source projects.

------
makecheck
There's one thing I can't understand about Apple's approach, and that is their
pathnames.

As good as Swift is, putting it _by default_ in asinine paths like
"/Library/Developer/Toolchains/swift-latest.xctoolchain/usr/bin" doesn't help
anybody (and a ton of stuff in OS X is like this).

A more Unixy way to do this would be /opt/swift-3.0/bin, where /opt/swift is a
symlink to /opt/swift-3.0. Even Apple used to limit the path insanity to
merely /Developer/usr/bin. Not sure what happened...

~~~
panic
Not defending the practice, but you can use 'xcrun' to find and run these
binaries. E.g. to find swiftc, you can use 'xcrun -f swiftc', and to run it,
'xcrun swiftc'.

~~~
makecheck
I suppose, though it doesn't tab-complete. :) There's all kinds of reasons to
want short paths. Having said that, I can create my own /opt symlink to a long
path too.

------
renownedmedia
[http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/swift.org](http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/swift.org)

It's not just you! [http://swift.org](http://swift.org) looks down from here.

------
cbeach
Such good news. I've bet my career on Scala, but Swift is sufficiently similar
in style that it will be an easy transition.

A language to write native (not VM-based) apps for the desktop, iPhone, iPad,
Apple Watch, CarPlay and Apple TV is becoming very compelling indeed.

~~~
distances
It doesn't work like that, you can't "bet your career" on a language. Either
you are interested in continuous learning or you aren't, and it's pretty clear
which one is a better choice when choosing between multiple employee
candidates.

~~~
cbeach
It does actually work like that, for me. I'm in my mid thirties and have
worked in financial software development for over a decade. Given the day rate
I'm earning for Scala development, I will be able to retire comfortably long
before Scala goes out of fashion.

Of course, I'll still be coding for fun after I've retired, so I'm looking
forward to learning Swift in my spare time, alongside the other languages I
code regularly in.

~~~
distances
Nice to hear it has worked well for you! I'll then modify my statement a bit a
say that I would never suggest "betting a career" on a single programming
language, but to of course dive in if a good opportunity presents itself.

------
blumomo
I would love to see Swift for Android programing. I'm already using Kotlin, a
language very close to Swift, for programming our Android apps. But I find
Swift niftier than Kotlin.

~~~
burntcookie90
In what way? I've recently started writing in Swift and I find it to be less
powerful than Kotlin. One such feature that's missing: extension expressions.
Allows things like `let` and `with` from the kotlin stdlib

~~~
Alphasite_
What exactly are extension expressions, do you mean extension methods? If so,
Swift does support them. I actually miss interface extensions in Kotlin, but
thats a java cross compatibility issue.

~~~
burntcookie90
look at the signature for `with`

    
    
        inline fun <T, R> with(receiver: T, f: T.() -> R): R 
    

it takes a lambda that is scoped to the receiver type `T`. This means the
lambda runs in the scope of whatever is passed in as a receiver.

    
    
        with(list) {
          add(item)
          add(item)
        }
    

This essentially lets you create DSLs for whatever.

Another thing that's bit me in butt recently is that `Protocol`s aren't
concrete types, unlike an `interface` in Java/Kotlin.

------
athenot
I wonder if Apple is positionning it as a competitor to Google's Go? They are
hinting at a usage beyond just iOS and OS X.

~~~
cies
I'm much more thrilled about Swift the about Go. Sure Go has a head start in
server-side department, but from what I know of Swift I'd much rather write
webapps in it then in Go.

Many webapps have a kind of "highlevelness" to them, and Swift nicely
addresses that with it's features. Go is somehow on a kind of feature diet
that's just not my cup of tea. And in terms of low-high-level-ness it I put it
somewhere in between Swift and the obviously low-level Rust.

~~~
namelezz
Swift gives you nice syntax and Go provides you good abstraction for
concurrency(channel and goroutines).

~~~
AlphaSite
Honestly, there are some libraries for swift which are shockingly authentic
clones of go's channel + routine syntax. Abstractions like that are not swifts
problem.

Edit: also, look at [https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-
libdispatch](https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-libdispatch) so those
libraries should be portable.

~~~
jug
Yes, this library is listed on swift.org right now as a work in progress for
Linux, so Apple is both aware and going to get it done.

------
SXX
Hope it's will have brighter future outside Apple ecosystem. It's nice to have
more tools for server-side development, but wish it's will be better on
desktop than ObjC / Cocoa / GNUstep was.

------
sinatra
This is good news (hoping the github link etc will start working in a day or
two)! One side effect of swift being open sourced is that more developers will
start looking at it for server side development. However, I personally think
that Swift will continue to have strong reliance on Apple (esp considering
that most external Swift developers will come from iOS development). So, till
I see Apple showing interest in Swift getting used on server side, I'll not
use it there.

~~~
danieldk
_esp considering that most external Swift developers will come from iOS
development_

I am wondering about this. To me, it seems that there is still space for a
modern, pragmatic language that compiles to native code. Coming from C and
C++, I have been using Go recently for applications where garbage collection
and some performance loss due to a relatively weak compiler is acceptable.

However, I still find the lack of parametric polymorphism tedious and annoying
as well as other stuff you'd come to expect from a modern language (algebraic
data types, non-nullable types, etc.).

Does anyone who has experience with Swift think that it could be a better
language for the niches Go has gained traction? (Besides iOS/Mac development?)

~~~
DrJokepu
I have worked extensively with both Swift and Go. The currently available
Swift implementation in Xcode is fairly closely tied to Cocoa (and hence OS
X); I think this would be a serious barrier to generic server-side usage of
Swift, so I'm curious to see if they have done anything about that (and what).

Otherwise, it's a fairly decent language. It doesn't have Go's concurrency
baked in to the language, but on OS X you can use Grand Central Dispatch
(libdispatch) which is a very decent concurrency library and it works very
well with Swift, I'm hoping it will be available in the Linux port of Swift as
well.

Besides the more sophisticated type system, a major advantage (or
disadvantage, depending on how you look at it) of Swift over Go is it's memory
management mechanism: it uses Automatic Reference Counting, which makes
garbage collection more deterministic and efficient, at the expense of a
certain level of overhead in the developer's thought process (e.g. the
developer has to be mindful of things such as reference cycles etc).

~~~
tarentel
It's not ready for production in this release according to the site but
libdispatch and Foundation are both being ported which should speed up server
side development on Linux.

------
Ingon
One of the biggest things for me is that now I can draw upon the knowledge and
knowhow of the people making Swift itself. Coming from Java, I'm used to
reading the sources of all the things and now I can finally do it. So
exciting, congrats to everyone involved!

------
cromwellian
This is pretty awesome. If all of the platform dependencies could be
abstracted away, this could form the core of yet another cross-mobile-platform
development framework, but with better performance and richer tooling.

I think it really depends on how much control Apple intends to exercise over
the IP. Could someone fork it and use it to create a mobile platform that
would be free from legal harassment if it competed with the iPhone?

~~~
staticint
_> this could form the core of yet another cross-mobile-platform development
framework_

Why not bridge the "yet another cross-mobile-platform development
framework(s)" that were written for Objective-C, the same way Apple did with
their frameworks? There is no need to restart them all over again in Swift to
access them in Swift.

Perhaps you were attempting to suggest that no quality cross-platform
frameworks ever materialized for cross-platform development under Objective-C?
(there were certainly attempts, including from big players) But if that is the
case, I'm not sure an arguably better, but not dramatically different,
language is going to change anything.

------
kenbellows
So does this mean we might finally get officially supported iOS development on
Windows and/or Linux soon?

~~~
krschultz
No. Swift the language is not to be confused with the iOS framework or tools.
While more and more of iOS (and I presume XCode) is written in Swift, that all
continues to be closed sourced code and is Mac specific.

~~~
kenbellows
:'( still I wait, likely without end

~~~
Joof
Secretly most of the sales of macs and profits of iOS are from developers.

~~~
therockhead
How do you know this ?

~~~
rsynnott
I assume it was a joke; it's not even a vaguely plausible proposition given
Mac sales.

~~~
Joof
It was indeed a joke

------
sbarre
Must be brand new because the Github links on the site don't work (assuming
they haven't made the repos public yet).

------
KevinMS
Somebody compare and contrast swift for backend development with golang, node,
etc. Google is giving me nothing useful.

~~~
niccaluim
I can't comment on Swift as I've not used it but I can say that Go is more
than just a language. It's the embodiment of Google's experience running large
engineering teams. So many of the decisions in Go--its simplicity, the
formatter, the opinionated directory structure, static linking, no special
build tools--make life a lot easier for teams. Again, I haven't used Swift,
but I don't get the sense that this was one of its design priorities. I've
been wrong before though :)

------
cdnsteve
How is developing on iOS these days? Swift seems like such nice a nice
language.

~~~
codeshaman
Swift is a very nice language. And it's pretty easy to learn too - it took me
about 2 weeks to get the basics of it and in 1 month I was producing code at
the same speed as with Objective-C.

After a couple of months of Swift-ing, I now started a project in C++ and
while it's nice to be back home (in the C++ world), I immediately feel like
I'm on my own - C++ doesn't make any attempt to protect me from myself
(although it feels like I have more power to do what I want).

The Swift compiler, on the other hand, will obsessively stop me from fitting a
square into a circle and will only allow me to do that if I declare loud and
clear that "I know what I'm doing!".

~~~
cies
> The Swift compiler, on the other hand, will obsessively stop me from fitting
> a square into a circle

You might really like Haskell :)

------
connorshea
Swift Package Manager? It looks like Apple has developed their own version
CocoaPods for Swift? Interesting.

~~~
thepumpkin1979
yes, although I think it's more similar to Carthage than to Cocoapods.

------
melling
If you're new to Swift, I maintain a list of blogs, etc about Swift. I just
past 2500 urls:

[http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html](http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html)

It can be viewed daily or weekly, if you're only interest in recent blogs:

[http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?date=0](http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?date=0)

[http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?week=0](http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html?week=0)

Finally, all the data is on Github:

[https://github.com/melling/SwiftResources](https://github.com/melling/SwiftResources)

~~~
omaranto
Are there really 2500 blogs about Swift? Did you mean blog posts instead (I'd
find that more believable)?

~~~
melling
Yes, blog posts and github repos, for example.

------
BuckRogers
Congrats to Chris Lattner and the others at Apple who were promoting this!
I've been watching Swift develop from the initial announcement because it
would be a bit like C#. A great backend language that gives you first-class
access on one of the most popular platforms.

------
dubcanada
The site is barely even indexed by Google yet, and the github repo is not even
done. I don't think it's ready yet.

~~~
keehun
Somebody at Apple probably wanted that sweet sweet karma.

EDIT: Works at IBM. SORRY.

~~~
harperlee
Well, the poster's web page says he works at IBM...

~~~
keehun
Oops. I did try to check his site, but it was coming up blank for me.

~~~
harperlee
Your theory might still stand. He may know people at Apple, so this does not
completely discard the scenario.

~~~
cableshaft
He may have heard it direct from Apple. They have a close partnership for
developing enterprise iOS apps, and have been for almost two years.

I had no idea myself until I went to interview at IBM. I haven't had the
opportunity to work with Swift professionally though, so they went with
someone else. Possibly the OP :P

[https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2014/07/15Apple-and-IBM-
For...](https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2014/07/15Apple-and-IBM-Forge-Global-
Partnership-to-Transform-Enterprise-Mobility.html)

------
giancarlostoro
I'm hoping to see builds for other distros and Windows as well. I'm curious
what GUI applications would be like for Swift on Linux. I hope we see a great
new platform for development with Swift :)

------
zmanian
Wonders about the state of Swift on Linux? Was expecting this to be timed with
the open source announcement.

~~~
untothebreach
Looks like they have builds for Ubuntu 14.04 and 15.10. I expect they would
work on other debian-based linuxes (linuces?) but haven't tried.

~~~
fake44637
Here are my results on a Debian jessie box:

If you just want to play with the REPL (usr/bin/swift in the Ubuntu 14.04
snapshot), all you have to do is:

    
    
      apt-get install python-dev
    

If you want to actually compile swift files (usr/bin/swiftc in the Ubuntu
14.04 snapshot), it appears extremely basic programs will compile with
jessie's clang-3.5, so all you have to do is:

    
    
      apt-get install clang
    

Note that the swift.org instructions claim you need clang-3.6, and you
probably do for more complex programs. For that, you'll need to temporarily
add a sid/unstable source and upgrade clang:

    
    
      echo 'deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list
      apt-get update
      apt-get install clang
    

(don't forget to remove the unstable line afterwards).

~~~
fake44637
so actually I'm running into the following error anytime I try to compile
something using swiftc with clang-3.6 installed:

    
    
      <unknown>:0: error: opening import file for module 'SwiftShims': No such file or directory

------
INTPnerd
I like that it's open source now, but until they remove the need to mark
certain references as weak or unknown, it still just feels like Apple doesn't
get modern languages. Until the automatic memory management is more automatic,
I will avoid swift if I can. I know many will say it is "not a big deal", but
that is not true. It is an extra thing the developer needs to keep track of
and to get right if they want to prevent bugs in their code. It makes
programming more stressful and less fun. It is something that is very easy
make a mistake with. It is a step backwards from other technologies. I know
ARC is supposed to be faster than other automatic memory management
techniques, but that is just an excuse. Yes, lower performance could be a
problem with fully automatic memory management. But problems were meant to be
solved, not dumped onto the users of your language. I'm sure it is possible to
get it fast enough for most projects. There should at least be a compiler
option to enable fully automatic memory management for projects that don't
need that extra bit of speed. Computers, including mobile devices, are getting
faster and faster. This is especially true for the iPhone and iPad.

------
theflagbug
Shameless self-promotion: Here is a great way to learn Swift on your phone:
[http://swifty-app.com/](http://swifty-app.com/)

~~~
weonlysmurf
Love your app man!

~~~
theflagbug
Thanks, glad to hear that!

------
return_0e
The Swift port for Linux seems to only support x86-64 for now.
[https://swift.org/blog/swift-linux-port/](https://swift.org/blog/swift-linux-
port/) I would like to see how swift could run on Linux ARM devices (Raspberry
Pi 2/Beagleboard/etc) and other platforms; given that the runtime is already
on iOS devices. Kudos to Apple for open-sourcing Swift.

~~~
wobbleblob
Try to compile it and see if you can get it to work?

~~~
Asmod4n
there is no source code, yet.

~~~
return_0e
Right now there is!:
[https://github.com/apple/swift](https://github.com/apple/swift) Also, the
dependencies to build swift looks fine to build it on other architectures.
I'll try to build it for the Raspberry Pi 2 to see.

~~~
wobbleblob
The CPU architecture shouldn't be a problem, as it's the primary target for
iOS apps.

I haven't gotten it to build yet, maybe I should read the manual, but I'm a
man, damnit, so I'll do that once I've tried absolutely everything else.

------
i_don_t_know
Very nice that you can debug functions in the repl and set breakpoints:

[https://swift.org/lldb/#why-combine-the-repl-and-
debugger](https://swift.org/lldb/#why-combine-the-repl-and-debugger)

I don't know any other repl that can do that. I know you can debug in (some)
lisps and smalltalk, but I don't know if you can set breakpoints too. Still a
nice and welcome feature.

~~~
ricardobeat
nodejs, ruby and python have had this for a while.

------
justplay
[https://github.com/apple/swift](https://github.com/apple/swift) is 404 .

~~~
freshyill
It's there now, but empty.

~~~
justplay
it is not there. [https://github.com/apple](https://github.com/apple) is
accessible . i guess OP somehow found this website and put it into HN. I don't
even see any press release by Apple related to this thing yet.

------
Scarbutt
A Golang killer?

~~~
cies
I forsee Swift has a long future on the server-side.

That will surely be taking up some of the dev't that would otherwise be done
in Go.

------
billybilly1920
Can this do GUI programming on Lin/Win? Or Are there usable gui libraries for
doing cross platform development like QT?

~~~
SXX
GNUstep developers stated several times that they'll implement bindings for
Swift if it's released as open source. Though from my personal (and very
limited) experience I may suggest that you won't use it for cross platform
development. It's works on Linux reasonable well, but support for Windows is
limited or at least it's was few years ago.

------
ricksplat
As a sometime Apple developer I do welcome this. Hopefully it will legitimise
some of the grey (non-official) toolchains and support the development of
tools and community that much of the rest of the software development world
enjoys, and people won't be tied solely to Apple's own dev tools.

Does anybody else think it's a little strange though? To have open source
tools solely to target a closed platform? I haven't used Swift myself but from
what I've seen it seems to be something like Javascript with libraries for
iOS, perhaps with a few semantic adjustments. Would that be a fair assessment?

I can't imagine it being used for much else beyond developing for iOS devices.
Perhaps Macs. So while it's free as in "beer", but could it truly be said to
be free as in "speech" in any substantial fashion?

------
crudbug
What was the design decision that required function declaration to be :

func hello(name: String) -> String { }

rather than,

func hello(name: String) : String { }

~~~
throwaway999888
It seems pretty consistent with functions in a set-notation sense, with
functions that map a tuple of stuff to something else. The mapping being
indicated by an arrow instead of a colon.

~~~
crudbug
I was thinking more about Types here

var name : String

func nameMe(name: String) : String

~~~
throwaway999888
I was half-thinking the same, but types and sets feel interchangeable on an
intuitive level in such cases.

Having both `: String` and `: String` seems to suggest that they are the same
type, which they are not. `nameMe(_)` is a function type, while `name` is a
"plain value", so to speak. I think that using arrows more clearly indicates
that it's a mapping from something to something else -- in the case of Swift,
I guess a mapping from a tuple to something else.

And think about anonymous functions, in general since I haven't looked into
Swift anonymous functions. If you indicate a function like this:

`func nameMe(name: String) : String`

How are you supposed to indicate an anonymous function? Like this:

`(name: String) : String`

Then it seems to say that name is a type of String, which in turn is a type of
String. I guess you could add something like a lambda to distinguish it:

`(λ name => name): String`

But now you've still effectively said that both `name` (a value of type
string) is the same type as the anonymous function (a function with one
argument). That's clearly wrong.

Using arrows for functions seems to be better when you start to want to talk
about types and values by themselves, like:

`1: Int`, `"hello": String`, `(λx => x) : a -> a`

~~~
crudbug
Point well received.

BTW

Fat arrow looks more appealing than simple arrow.

All the other pieces look very well designed.

~~~
throwaway999888
The single-line arrow has both precedent in set theory, type theory, and
mathematical logic.

------
espadrine
Linux support is hinted at in examples:

    
    
      #if os(Linux)
      import Glibc
      #else
      import Darwin.C
      #endif
    

[https://swift.org/package-manager/#example-usage](https://swift.org/package-
manager/#example-usage)

~~~
skrause
I guess the fact that there are official Linux packages in the download
section are a pretty good hint that there will be Linux support.

~~~
espadrine
Thanks, I'm trying to download it.

------
talles
Page not found on GitHub?

[https://swift.org/source-code/](https://swift.org/source-code/)
[https://github.com/apple/swift](https://github.com/apple/swift)

~~~
sdegutis
They changed their mind.

EDIT: I'm joking of course. More likely, they realized they accidentally
forgot to excise some incredibly sensitive private information from the repo's
history and are working fast on it before they make the repo public again.

~~~
Ygg2
It seems to be down due to traffic.

~~~
sdegutis
[https://github.com/apple/swift](https://github.com/apple/swift) wouldn't
appear non-existent due to traffic.

------
atmosx
It's WAY too slow to load and most pages time-out for me... I understand the
_hug of death_ coming from HN and twitter and reddit (and God where from) but
this is Apple-backed right?!

------
pjmlp
Congratulations on the efforts done by whole involved to make it open source.

But I wonder if it will fare better than Objective-C outside Apple eco-systems
without the tools and OS libraries...

------
lassejansen
Interesting, the compiler seems to be implemented in C++.

------
golergka
[https://github.com/apple/](https://github.com/apple/)

This organization has no public repositories.

~~~
mattkrea
Let's please stop trying to say GitHub == Open Source.

~~~
matthewmacleod
Nobody is saying that – but the site links to a github repo that doesn't yet
exist. Chill.

------
AlphaSite
There is one more very interesting project under the swift umbrella:
[https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-
libdispatch](https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-libdispatch) so now swift
should have a useful approach to concurrency.

~~~
cmyr
Looks like they need to port GCD/libdispatch so they can implement a native
concurrency model on top of it in Swift 3(?).

~~~
oflannabhra
Probably not Swift 3.0 according to current plans[1], but it sure looks like
they want to have a native concurrency model at some point.

1\. [https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution#out-of-
scope](https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution#out-of-scope)

------
codingvelocity
Now that swift is opensource i'm looking forward to some better tools being
released for it. Right now xcodes support of swift is pretty lacking. No
refactoring, and compile errors are fairly ambiguous sometimes.

Since this has linux support i wonder if xcode or something similar will be
ported to linux.

~~~
_puk
No doubt JetBrains will step up to the mark.

They already have support for swift in AppCode, but surely a community edition
"SwiftStudio" can't be too much to wish for.

It worked wonders for Android development outside of Eclipse.

------
phatbyte
I love this! I got say, that I've been a fan of Swift since the day Apple
announced it. It's a such a beautiful language, with so many new paradigms
implemented, safe and easy to learn.

I really hope this boosts the widespread of Swift. I'd love to use it for
back-end dev for instance.

------
peterle
Initial commit was made 4,5 ago... Is it normal it takes so long for a
language to become Open Source?

commit 18844bc65229786b96b89a9fc7739c0fc897905e

Author: Chris Lattner <clattner@apple.com>

AuthorDate: Sat Jul 17 23:50:59 2010 +0000

Commit: Chris Lattner <clattner@apple.com>

CommitDate: Sat Jul 17 23:50:59 2010 +0000

    
    
        initial swift test

~~~
coldtea
There's no "normal" or not "normal". There are projects that became open
source after a decade or more of existance.

Open Office for example had a long life as the proprietary "Star Office".
Blender too IIRC.

------
trymas
Nice, I am excited.

And probably I am more excited not about the open-sourcing of it, but that
there will be a package manager [0].

[0] [https://swift.org/package-manager/#conceptual-
overview](https://swift.org/package-manager/#conceptual-overview)

------
praseodym
Happily surprised by the fact that they merged 16 pull requests since the repo
got open sourced :)

------
therockhead
Any news regarding Swifts ability to interoperate with CPP, like Objective
C++?

~~~
oflannabhra
Yes, it is currently out of scope for Swift 3.0[1]

1\. [https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution#out-of-
scope](https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution#out-of-scope)

~~~
therockhead
Great to know this now instead of having to wait until next WWDC.

------
imranismail
Been learning Elixir for the past few months and it's been a fun experience
learning a functional language and OTP.

This might just be the thing to cross the "native" on my language learning
checklist.

------
tornilloo
I couldn't git with

git clone git@github.com:apple/swift.git swift

but you can use:

git clone [https://...../apple/...](https://...../apple/...). swift

and the same for the remaining libraries.

~~~
tvon

        git clone git@github.com:apple/swift.git swift
    

Works for me.

------
SXX
Wow. Less than 30 minutes pass and site already loading with huge delay.

------
sdegutis
They're releasing the source code to libdispatch? I thought that was one of
Apple's trade secrets, and more applicable than just Swift apps since it's a C
lib?

~~~
hiimnate
libdispatch has been open source since 2009

[https://libdispatch.macosforge.org/post/libdispatch-is-
open-...](https://libdispatch.macosforge.org/post/libdispatch-is-open-source/)

------
sandis
Repositories starting to go public now on Github -
[https://github.com/apple](https://github.com/apple)

------
pbreit
Would anyone use Swift if it wasn't necessary for iOS?

~~~
collias
It isn't necessary for iOS. It's still possible to write every part of an app
in only Objective-C, as there are no Swift-only APIs. AFAIK, there are no
indications of that changing any time soon.

~~~
pbreit
OK, that it's the preferred (by Apple) language/platform for iOS development?
I'm guessing you knew what I meant.

~~~
xenihn
Except it isn't, the vast majority of Apple's internal iOS stuff is still
written in Objective-C.

~~~
pbreit
Yes it is. The old stuff just happens to still exist but it's obviously not
"preferred".

~~~
xenihn
Sorry, I left out a word. The vast majority of Apple's internal iOS stuff is
still being written in Objective-C.

------
estefan
Is it possible to write complex iOS apps using swift alone, without having to
learn any Obj-C? Is there full library support, good ecosystem, etc.?

~~~
Albright
Yeah, sure. Go for it.

~~~
estefan
Oh cool. That's foresight by Apple.

------
piratebroadcast
Maybe now we can add a way to get a random value from an array like
array,sample in Ruby. Lots of work currently to do such a simple thing in
Swift.

~~~
DerekL
You don't need to modify the compiler to do that. You could just write that in
Swift.

------
lsm
Be patient guys. Good things come to those who wait.

------
symlinkk
Hopefully we'll see it on more platforms now!

------
jug
Wow, Swift.org is getting hammered right now.

------
be5invis
So let's guess, will Microsoft create a Windows-supporting fork, just like
Redis?

~~~
Scarbutt
Swift#

------
truncate
Is it just me or is anyone else getting 404 for binary download (Ubuntu).

------
altonzheng
Wow, seems like Apple is following the steps of Microsoft now!

------
merb
What means "swift is memory safe"? does it use a GC?

~~~
mcphage
No, it uses "automatic reference counting"—it keeps a reference count of
memory usage and frees it when it's no longer being referenced. And (for the
most part) it automatically inserts the reference counting into your code
during compilation. There are still some hints that you need to give it (like
telling it about weak references to avoid reference loops, etc.)

------
mnml_
404 On the github repo

------
jeremy_wiebe
Brutal to see all the comment spam on the pull requests.

------
avitzurel
Not loading for me. Anyone experiencing the same issue?

------
mxx
Is it worth learning Swift? (eg. on Linux)

~~~
seivan
Yeah it's a nice and more importantly a safe language. I am just worried about
breaking changes.

------
singularity2001
@OP: Please change title to "Swift will be Open Source soon" until the git
repositories become actually available.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
The source is available now. The git repo's not up yet, but it's still 'open
source' now.

Edit: And now it's on GitHub.

------
dbrannan
Can we get Adobe to open source the flash player plugin as well? Can anyone
think of a reason Adobe continues to refuse?

~~~
ascagnel_
Potentially mired in rights issues (since they originally acquired it from
Macromedia, who may have not owned 100% of the codebase), or written so badly
that vulnerabilities will be made very obvious by its open-sourcing.

------
mikado
Copyright © 2015 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Swift and the Swift logo are
trademarks of Apple Inc.

------
anjanb
anyone knows about a port to windows x64 environment ?

~~~
niutech
RemObjects Silver?

------
mozil
cannot download snapshot now

------
eccstartup
Finally.

------
Twisell
I see this as an hilarious welcome joke from the community :
[https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/17](https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/17)

Its developer's way to say FIRST

~~~
ecopoesis
No. This is a childish joke, and inappropriate. As a community of
professionals, we should do everything we can to discourage this kind of crap.

Joe Cumbo (mooman219), I hope you never apply for a job I'm the hiring manager
for, because I would never hire you after seeing this kind of
unprofessionalism in your Github profile.

~~~
corndoge
And I would never want to work for you if you've such a dearth of humor :P

Exactly how is this inappropriate?

~~~
ecopoesis
A company that is traditionally hostile to open source gets as one of its
first "contributions" to a newly opened project a troll, confirming a bad
stereotype of the open source community.

How could that not be considered inappropriate?

~~~
rimantas
Apple is in now way hostile to OSS.

------
alia20
999999999999999 wl

------
agp2572
Now all we need is a transpiler that converts Swift to Javascript.

------
artursapek
Ouch, I guess this leaked? Who is the OP?

~~~
martin-adams
I don't see how it was leaked, it's on the swift.org homepage.

------
tornilloo
Doesn't work in x86, ubuntu 15.10, bash:
/home/user/Descargas/swift-2.2-SNAPSHOT-2015-12-01-b-ubuntu15.10/usr/bin/swift:
no puede ejecutar el archivo binario: Formato de ejecutable incorrecto

Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU T4500 @ 2.30GHz × 2

------
envy2
Interesting that this domain is registered at GoDaddy via DomainsByProxy, and
hosted on a SoftLayer IP block.

WebKit.org, for instance, is registered with CSC Corporate Domains the same as
apple.com, and is hosted on an Apple-owned IP block.

Perhaps a (further) indication this isn't ready for prime time yet?

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Why would this at all be interesting?

Good grief, not everything is some mysterious conspiracy or some such
nonsense.

------
jorgecastillo
At first I was like 'AWESOME', than I was like 'oh fuck, not ready yet'. I am
not upvoting this, until there is a GitHub repository that I can clone!

~~~
baldfat
There is a GitHub Repo you can clone. Just had an issue with traffic.

~~~
jorgecastillo
AWESOME!

------
iamsohungry
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
point....](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html)

~~~
chaz72
Arguing about "the point" misses the point. There's plenty of room for both
free software and open source software.

~~~
iamsohungry
There's room for plenty of things that I don't care about. I don't care about
open source software that is still controlled by Apple.

~~~
cowsandmilk
yeah, very self consistent, pretend you care about the GPL, then decide it is
the vendor you really care about. Who cares that Apple controls GPL software
installed on almost every GNU/Linux machine?

~~~
iamsohungry
> yeah, very self consistent, pretend you care about the GPL, then decide it
> is the vendor you really care about.

No, I'd be saying that about any other vendor who released code under a
proprietary open source license, too.

> Who cares that Apple controls GPL software installed on almost every
> GNU/Linux machine?

How exactly do you think they do that?

