[lugm.org] Swift to be open sourced

[Vy-Shane Sin Fat]

On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 2:00 AM, Nayar Joolfoo <nayar at joolfoo.com> wrote:

> Hey guys,
>
> Swift is a programming language created by apple. It has been announced
> that it will be open sourced.
> https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=29
>
> "At launch we intend to contribute ports for OS X, iOS, and Linux."
>
> 1. I do not understand exactly what an open source programming language
> is.
> 2. How do you feel as a Linux user/developer about this?
>
> Regards
> Nayar
>

It's good news that they are open sourcing Swift. Not unexpected though,
because the people behind the language had already said that they would
like to do just that when it was first released one year ago.

What was a surprise to me was that Apple is also supporting it on Linux.
They probably want to use it on the server side too. What does that mean
for now? Not much. The Swift standard library is pretty small and we'll
have to wait until more libraries and frameworks are written in pure Swift.
Swift applications currently rely on a lot of libraries that are written in
Objective-C, and Apple isn't open sourcing these. However, there is a lot
of positive developer interest around the language, and it's only a matter
of time until open source fills in the missing pieces. It might take a few
years, but I'm sure that the language has a bright future on Linux servers.
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