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Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

(www.swift.org)
612 points dayanruben | 1 comments | 01 Feb 25 16:44 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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uhura ◴[01 Feb 25 19:07 UTC] No.42901158[source]▶
I believe that this long game of Swift being "good for everything" but "better for Apple platforms" will be detrimental to the language. This does not help the language nor seems to bring more people to the ecosystem.

Competitors seems to have a combination of: - Being more open-source - Have more contributors - Have a narrower scope

Maybe they should consider open sourcing all the tooling (like Xcode) otherwise the gap will only grow over time when compared to other languages.

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VWWHFSfQ ◴[01 Feb 25 19:45 UTC] No.42901489[source]▶
I doubt Apple really cares much about competing with other languages, tooling, or platforms when it comes to Swift or Xcode. They have a completely captured audience and ecosystem, and anything beyond that isn’t even a "best effort" — it's more like, "You're welcome to see if it works for you, but don’t bother us if it doesn't."
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threeseed ◴[01 Feb 25 20:10 UTC] No.42901751[source]▶
a) If Apple didn't care about competition they wouldn't have created Swift.

b) They don't have a captured ecosystem at all. You can write iOS/macOS apps using Flutter, React Native etc. All of which are detrimental to Apple because they force apps to adopt a lowest common denominator approach and not use the latest Apple technologies.

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1. kennywinker ◴[01 Feb 25 23:56 UTC] No.42903903{3}[source]▶
> All of which are detrimental to Apple because they force apps to adopt a lowest common denominator approach and not use the latest Apple technologies.

I think you might have this backwards. What you say used to be true back in the days of phonegap, where the hardware was abstracted far away, but all of the frameworks you mention provide pretty easy paths to access new APIs and hardware features. But companies that are drawn to cross-platform tooling already want a uniform experience across devices - and that's why you get the lowest common denominator being used with tools like react native.