alt Hacker NewsSwift never felt truly open source either. That people can propose evolution points doesn’t change the fact that Apple still holds all the keys and pushes whatever priorities they need, even if they’re not a good idea (e.g. Concurrency, Swift Testing etc)
Also funny enough, all cross platform work is with small work groups, some even looking for funding … anyway.
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stephc_int13 • today at 12:16 AM
The fact that Swift is an Apple baby should indeed be considered a red flag. I know there are some Objective-C lovers out there but I think it is an abomination.
Apple is (was?) good at hardware design and UX, but they pretty bad at producing software.
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> Swift never felt truly open source either.
Apple has been always 'transactional' when it comes to OSS - they open source things only when it serves a strategic purpose. They open-sourced Swift only because they needed the community to build an ecosystem around their platform.
Yeah, well, sure they've done some work around LLVM/Clang, WebKit, CUPS, but it's really not proportional to the size and the influence they still have.
Compare them to Google, with - TensorFlow, k8s, Android (nominally), Golang, Chrome, and a long tail of other shit. Or Meta - PyTorch and the Llama model series. Or even Microsoft, which has dramatically reversed course from its "open source is a cancer" era (yeah, they were openly saying that, can you believe it?) to becoming one of the largest contributors on GitHub.
Apple I've heard even have harshest restrictions about it - some teams are just not permitted to contribute to OSS in any way. Obsessively secretive and for what price? No wonder that Apple's software products are just horrendously bad, if not all the time - well, too often. And on their own hardware too.
I wouldn't mind if Swift dies, I'm glad Objective-C is no longer relevant. In fact, I can't wait for Swift to die sooner.