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Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

(www.swift.org)
612 points dayanruben | 3 comments | 01 Feb 25 16:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | 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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jitl ◴[01 Feb 25 23:44 UTC] No.42903797[source]▶
I don't get this reaction.

Apple: here, we're open-sourcing this previously closed-source Apple-specific thing that made Swift better on Apple platforms. We're moving the Apple stuff into a plugin so Windows and Linux can be equal peers to Apple in the new system. We've implemented preliminary support for Windows & Linux and plan to continue work to bring them up to parity.

Hacker News: 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.

Like, what more do you want from them? For them to only open-source Swift Build once they've fully implemented complete parity for Windows and Linux? In the years you'd be waiting for full parity, we'd still see this same kind of comment on every story about swift, asking when they're going to open source a production-level build system.

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gruuuk ◴[02 Feb 25 00:09 UTC] No.42903995[source]▶
They should have been fully open source with full linux support and parity since day one.

That would actually help the language get traction. At this point it's a dying language.

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1. sgt ◴[02 Feb 25 07:16 UTC] No.42906769{3}[source]▶
There's a lot more buzz and activity around Swift than many other languages. It's literally up there with Rust, in terms of excitement (perhaps not quite as high). But I think if they get excitement outside of the Apple ecosystem, things should start to get super interesting.

Some are already adopting it like Ladybird browser.

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2. dzikimarian ◴[02 Feb 25 09:27 UTC] No.42907445[source]▶
Sorry to be mood killer, but I think that might be your bubble. That's a first news about Swift I've seen in a long time and I don't see a reason to try it, given alternatives. Nowhere near Rust level of presence in discussion.
3. homebrewer ◴[02 Feb 25 11:13 UTC] No.42907916[source]▶
If we're trading anecdotes, I'll share mine as someone's who's completely outside of Apple ecosystem and is not interested in it in the slightest: I only ever hear about Swift on HN, nowhere else. Most of my colleagues, friends and acquaintances (who is in IT, but none of whom are Apple users) don't even know it exist, while everyone has at least heard about Rust. We all live in bubbles, admit it.