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

[John W Kennedy]

On 2015-04-02 18:54:46 +0000, Gregory Casamento said:

> 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.

Why, it is more stable than it was last summer, but it is not stable. 
In the latest beta, "if"-"let" has been expanded to allow more than one 
"let", an optional "where" following each "let", and a binary test 
before the first "let". The precedence of "??" has changed. The "&/" 
and "&%" operators have been removed. Type "Set<T>" has been added 
(bridged to "NSSet"). Initialization of "let" variables can be deferred 
(as long as all possible paths initialize -- just once -- before use). 
"static" properties and methods are implemented. "as" is split into 
"as" (for cases that cannot fail) and "as!" (for cases that can fail, 
and will crash if they do). And there's more. The current version of 
Swift is designated 1.1; XCode 4.3 will have Swift 1.2.

>   The compiler doesn't
> crash

No, but it does reject as "too complex" some expressions that are 
ridiculously simple, and some error messages are insanely off the point.

>  and it is a very well defined language.

Not compared to Ada or PL/I, but I admit they're outliers. Of course, 
Swift has the advantage of being able to limit itself to the 8-bit, 
two's-complement, IEEE-754, Unicode world, so that a lot of things 
don't need to be described, and a lot of classical corner cases don't 
exist.

> I very much doubt Apple will EVER release Swift as open source.  Not
> in a million years.   I hope I'm wrong.

About the only thing known to the public is that there are people in 
Apple who want it to be.

--
John W Kennedy
"...when you're trying to build a house of cards, the last thing you 
should do is blow hard and wave your hands like a madman."
 --  Rupert Goodwins