Apple's Swift Is Now Open-Source, Development Snapshots For Ubuntu

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apple's Swift Is Now Open-Source, Development Snapshots For Ubuntu

We've been waiting since this summer for Apple to open-source their Swift programming language and provide Linux support. This week they've done their initial release and stuck to their word...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-Swift-Open-Source

[Scellow]

Swift is great, but it's not crossplatform

The day it'll be crossplatform i'll be interested

[unixfan2001]

Swift is great, but it's not crossplatform

The day it'll be crossplatform i'll be interested

Did you read the article?

Support for Windows and Android is currently being explored. "

atari314

I'd use Swift in a heartbeat, provided it had a fully functional, multi platform GUI implementation and supported Windows and Android.
My employer is exploring all sorts of frameworks for a new multi platform strategy and this, next to Mono, would certainly fit the bill.

[beast]

Did you read the article?

Without the prop. Apple libs it is useless.

[unixfan2001]

Without the prop. Apple libs it is useless.

Not necessarily. One could always write replacements.
Mono isn't useless either, despite lacking most Microsoft libraries.

[zanny]

Not necessarily. One could always write replacements.
Mono isn't useless either, despite lacking most Microsoft libraries.

Mono developed reimplementations of eveything from Forms (GTK#) to XNA (Monogame) to be useful. Who is going to pick up Swift to develop a cross platform GUI framework on top of it?

[nadro]

Swift is step backward when we compare it to Objective-C eg. in C++ area (very popular in iOS world). In Swift you need stupid bridges in Objective-C to mix Swift and C++, in Objective-C you can directly use C++ (Objective-C++). If Apple will not fix this situation, Swift will be useless for many tasks.

[L_A_G]

I doubt Swift was ever built with the intention of making it easy to use C++ code in it. More probably than not it was intended to make it easy to write new cross platform applications from the ground up and the C++ bridges were probably built to make it easier to re-use legacy code before you re-write it in Swift.

Still not convinced there's any real reason for Swift when we already have C++ and Qt to do the same thing, but the easier it is to port applications across platforms, the better. I can definitely see OSX developers using this to port over their applications to Linux now that it's about as easy as porting a Qt application from OSX to Linux.

[unixfan2001]

Well. It's mainly the syntax I'm looking forward to. It's got some really nice syntactic sugar.

[zanny]

I can definitely see OSX developers using this to port over their applications to Linux now that it's about as easy as porting a Qt application from OSX to Linux.

It isn't easy. There are no graphics libraries. OSX applications are useless on desktop Linux with Swift until someone reimplements Cocoa, and that sounds like a buttload of effort.