Re: GNUstep's lack of progress and Apple's holding back Swift language

[Gregory Casamento]

Maxthon,

On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 1:51 AM, Maxthon Chan <xcvista@me.com> wrote:
> Dear fellows:
>
> Is it possible that Apple is holding Swift from being released to public, 
> despite its popularity and demand, have a bit of reason in GNUstep’s lack of 
> progress?

I very seriously doubt Apple would hold back Swift for any reason
related to GNUstep.  Also, I would love to know what you mean by lack
of progress.  Admittedly progress has been slow, but not non-existant.
Most of this is because people spend far too much time complaining
about progress on the mailing list instead of coding. ;)

Apple is withholding Swift for one reason only and that is because
they want to keep it Apple-only so that it makes applications less
portable.  I'm sure Apple is not happy about companies such as
Apportable making it very easy for people to port their apps to other
mobile platforms.  Unfortunately the same demand does not exist on the
Mac platform.

> Our libraries is still at the level of Lion maybe Snow Leopard, and obviously 
> that won’t be able to support running Swift code.

Actually different parts of the code are at different levels depending
on what was needed by various people.  Some classes are up to 10.9
levels and others are still at 10.6 or 10.7.   As of yet, no one has
done a full assessment of what level each class is at.   The MISSING
file contains a list of all classes and methods which currently need
to be implemented.

Swift is not dependant on any features which exist within the Cocoa
APIs in 10.9 or 10.10.  I know this for two reasons:

1) I'm implementing a swift compiler.
2) I've been working on an app using a mix of ObjC and Swift for the
last few months.

Swift is dependant on the ObjC runtime and ours (the one by David
Chisnall) is fully capable of supporting it.  So, as for GNUstep not
being able to support running Swift code that's not true.

> Max.

Later,
-- 
Gregory Casamento
GNUstep Lead Developer / OLC, Principal Consultant
http://www.gnustep.org - http://heronsperch.blogspot.com
http://ind.ie/phoenix/