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

[David Chisnall]

On 5 Jun 2014, at 07:52, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller <hns@goldelico.com> wrote:

> Conclusion: a Swift (pre)compiler/translator would reduce the lock to move to 
> other platforms...
> 
> Would it be difficult to write such a translator to standard Obj-C? IMHO no. 
> Just some rolling up sleeves.
> Perhaps someone (unrelated to GNUstep) will pick up and start a project on 
> GitHub (even before we have discussed moving GNUstep there :).

Dear God no!  You *might* be able to write a translator from Swift to 
Objective-C++ that didn't suck completely, but trying to implement Swift 
Generics, overflow-checked arithmetic, and maybe types in Objective-C would be 
doomed to give you an implementation that was slow at best, but most likely 
buggy and incomplete.

I exchanged a couple of emails with Chris Lattner about open sourcing their 
Swift compiler.  They haven't yet made a decision on it, and are currently very 
busy getting ready for releases.  My suggestion would be to wait and see.  

Swift does look very nicely designed.  The syntax is clean (unlike recent Apple 
versions of Objective-C), the semantics are consistent and coherent, and it 
fixes almost all of the things that annoy me about Objective-C.  

David

-- Sent from my STANTEC-ZEBRA