logoalt Hacker News

nomelyesterday at 10:53 PM6 repliesview on HN

First sentence of the wiki page [1]:

> Swift is a high-level general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language created by Chris Lattner in 2010 for Apple Inc. and maintained by the open-source community.

As the article repeats, it is not Apple specific.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)


Replies

piyuvyesterday at 11:56 PM

Swift being maintained by the open source community is an illusion. The community was very against function builders. Apple went ahead and did it anyway because they needed it for SwiftUI. The open source community just provides discussion, and Apple gets its way either way.

show 1 reply
dochtmanyesterday at 11:15 PM

I'd bet a supermajority of Swift commits comes from Apple developers. Pretty sure the rust-lang/rust commit authors would be much less centralized.

WD-42today at 12:04 AM

Yup just like google doesn’t actually control chromium right

Aurornisyesterday at 11:13 PM

I know Swift is technically not Apple specific, but it says right there in your quote that it was created for Apple and Apple is the giant weight behind it.

I doubt Apple is in danger of dropping Swift, but if they did it would create a devastating vacuum in the Swift ecosystem.

afavourtoday at 12:29 AM

But the fact remains that if Apple abandoned Swift tomorrow the language would almost certainly wither and die.

heavyset_gotoday at 12:44 AM

It's about as maintained by the "open source community" as Android is lol