Re: The Swift Programming Language: what is our position towards this?

[Gregory Casamento]

Hey Lars,

I have been looking into this language for the last few days.   I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but I have read the technical reference on it (available as a free ebook from Apple, complete with the BNF grammar in the back).

On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 3:12 PM, Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf <lars.sonchocky-helldorf@hamburg.de> wrote:

Hi 'steppers,

I am sure the one or another of us has heard about that new language for Cocoa/Cocoa Touch that Apple has recently introduced:

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/AboutTheLanguageReference.html

What is our position towards this? Is there already an official GNUstep position?

​There isn't really one as of yet as the community has only had days to form an opinion of the language.​

 

If not, what are your opinions?

​I believe that it is very _javascript_ like in order to attract those who dislike pointers and the "weird" syntax of Objective-C.  It is a concession to those who are more used to scripting languages than C or C++. ​ I'm of the opinion that they are doing this to curtail cross platform development (such as Apportable and others have achieved on Android as well as other platforms).

I believe that​ if Swift isn't released as open source then it is an attempt at lock-in on Apple's platform and, as such, represents an assault on user and developer freedoms. Microsoft had C# now Apple has Swift.  If there is someone that would like to take up the mantle of implementing an open swift compiler, I think it would be an interesting endeavor (whether it's part of GNUstep or not).   Swift utilizes the Objective-C runtime so it's not worlds apart and would be able to leverage existing ObjC code.

 

Does anybody know about the legal status of this language, e.g. whether we're allowed to support it or not?

​We are always *allowed* to support whatever we wish.  There is nothing restricting us from using any free implementation which becomes available.   As far as Apple releasing a free version, I'm not holding my breath on that one. 

Happy stepping,

        Lars
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​Later,​

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Gregory Casamento
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