On 2015-11-25 17:40, Joakim wrote:
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.
But I also doubt that they will try very hard. The ARM64 backend, as you mentioned, was available and in use by Apple long before it was pushed upstream. Same thing with many other features in Clang and LLVM. Take null-ability and Objective-C generics. Apple had an implementation ready and adopt their whole (most of?) SDK to use these features before they were pushed upstream.
Also, take a look at the Windows support as an example, which was poorly supported by Clang/LLVM. I don't think Apple has tried a tiny bit at all to improve the Clang/LLVM support for Windows.
I'm guessing the only reason why they will release a Linux port is because OS X and Linux are fairly similar, making this small(er) effort.
-- /Jacob Carlborg
