On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 16:17:45 UTC, Chris wrote:
On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 16:02:18 UTC, Joakim wrote:
[snip]
Server Swift might really end up as a niche within a niche.
Or it might end up becoming really popular, as a compiled,
modern language that can be used on mobile and the server.
I don't really care how Swift does or follow it, but it will
be competition for D, as it has generics, unlike Go, and
doesn't have Rust's unfamiliar syntax or stringent emphasis on
memory safety. It's an up-and-coming competitor for D people
to watch out for.
With Apple behind it, it might become popular, but not
necessarily in the OSS community. What if Apple started to make
their own Apple specific extensions that are not open sourced
and have to be backengineered on Linux. Then Swift would end up
like OpenStep, wouldn't it?
I don't see Apple doing all that stuff nowadays. This move to
open-source Swift and port it to linux seems driven by the llvm
devs, I doubt the company really cares. Apple open-sourced their
ARM64 backend for llvm last year, despite it being better than
the incomplete OSS backend being worked on in llvm and providing
a competitive advantage for their 64-bit ARM devices, so that I
can now use it for Android too. Of course, there are a _lot_
less Android/Aarch64 devices than iOS.
Apple really had no incentive to do that from a competitive
standpoint, other than maybe the llvm devs at Apple not wanting
to maintain two Aarch64 backends. Yet, they did it anyway. I
don't think they really care about keeping Swift to themselves
when they're the largest company on the planet and are minting
$53 billion in profits a year! For context, that's only $15
billion less than google's entire revenue over the last year, ie
their profits alone are almost all much as all the money google
brought in.
I don't think they're sitting around thinking about how to make a
couple million off Swift. ;)
