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

[ChanMaxthon]

My personal feeling of the current hacking environment for GNUstep is that it 
is not exactly friendly to GUI tools, especially Xcode.

Have any of you checked out the project xctool? Is it possible for us to fork 
that project into a replacement of gnustep-make? It would enable us to build 
from straight Xcode project files, and leverage the fact that Xcode is the best 
IDE for Objective-C out there.

Autotools may also be replaced if we break gcc build compatibility (which is 
not recommended now anyway) and make use of clang's __has_include() feature.

In order for Swift to work we need to make Modules work, which would require 
patches to clang, as well as a module scanner that can build the module maps 
from pkg-info or dpkg information.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 3, 2015, at 07:27, Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> James,
> 
> Unfortunately, in spite of it being "useless and boring" it is also
> necessary since it will likely become the defacto language on Apple
> platforms supplanting ObjC.   Personally, having some experience with
> Swift, I don't understand why it's perceived to be better than ObjC.
> It's syntax is closer to C or C++ but incorporates "named" parameters
> (something which is a proposed feature of the newest C++ standard, I
> may add).   It seems that the reason so many people are happy about
> Swift is because it's NOT ObjC, for whatever sense that makes.
> 
> Swift does make it easier to detect some issues because it is strongly
> typed.   This is what the whole "optionals" features is all about.
> 
> It would be wonderful if more people would help port apps and
> implement those APIs which are required to support them.
> 
> GC
> 
>> On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 6:36 PM, James Carthew <jcarthew@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Frankly I find Swift to be both boring and useless. I'd much rather see
>> things like quartzcore and webkit be completely ported to GNUstep than waste
>> time on yet another programming language. The more Cocoa/NextStep API that
>> gets ported, the more apps/uses for GNUstep will appear. I see Swift as a
>> really bad use of developer resources. It hasn't had enough uptake to
>> matter/influence the major APIs.
>> 
>> On 3 April 2015 at 05:54, Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> John,
>>> 
>>> On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 1:56 PM, John W Kennedy <jwkenne@attglobal.net>
>>> wrote:
>>>> On 2015-04-02 06:03:52 +0000, Gregory Casamento said:
>>>>> 
>>>>> 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 suppose the fact that it isn't entirely stable yet has nothing to do
>>>> with
>>>> it? (The current Xcode beta includes a Swift-to-Swift translator.)
>>> 
>>> I'm not sure lack of stability has anything to do with it either.
>>> Swift itself as a language is fairly stable.  The compiler doesn't
>>> crash and it is a very well defined language.
>>> 
>>> I very much doubt Apple will EVER release Swift as open source.  Not
>>> in a million years.   I hope I'm wrong.
>>> 
>>> GC
>>> --
>>> Gregory Casamento
>>> GNUstep Lead Developer / OLC, Principal Consultant
>>> http://www.gnustep.org - http://heronsperch.blogspot.com
>>> http://ind.ie/phoenix/
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Discuss-gnustep mailing list
>>> Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org
>>> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Gregory Casamento
> GNUstep Lead Developer / OLC, Principal Consultant
> http://www.gnustep.org - http://heronsperch.blogspot.com
> http://ind.ie/phoenix/
> 
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