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Swift for Windows (swiftforwindows.codeplex.com)
43 points by chrisamanse 3697 days ago
3 comments

That's great. Now we need a UI framework :)
Maybe it'd be possible to use code from the Microsoft iOS to Windows bridge? It's for objective c, but it bridges UIkit to UWP controls...

https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/tree/master/Frameworks/...

Can you dynamically load DLLs? If so, there's your UI kit (sortove).
Newbie here. How is this possible? I guess that most of the libraries UIKit,.. are only available on MacOS and Unix. How can this run on Windows?
This is just Swift :) It does not include the UIKit or AppKit framework. Not yet at least. Let's hope that Apple open source them too.
Apple should drop the bomb at WWDC and announce macOS as open source.
Hah. I'm sure they'll do it just after they finally open up iMessage.
Their online tech, bundled apps, and the Aqua GUI style don't need to be opened up for macOS* itself + the Kits + Finder to be open sourced.

If people could reliably and legally install it on any PC they want it could still cut into Windows' share a lot more than it currently can.

It's not hard to imagine that before long, enterprising people will release custom "distros" of it, say with an up-to-date OpenGL, or even a Wine/DirectX emulation layer baked in so we can just double-click on any .exe and have it run natively.

* As I'm assuming/hoping it's going to be called starting June 13. They could open source "OS X" while keeping the "macOS" brandname for themselves.

My point is that Apple has no interest in doing any of that.

> If people could reliably and legally install it on any PC they want it could still cut into Windows' share a lot more than it currently can.

But Apple would lose a huge amount of money on hardware sales, which is where they make their money. Apple even tried an approved clones program in the 90s, it was a miserable failure and one of the first things Jobs did on his return was kill it.

> It's not hard to imagine that before long, enterprising people will release custom "distros" of it

Which Apple really wouldn't want. One of the selling points of OS X is the lack of variation in both software and hardware.

Apple's already done what you're asking for.

The Darwin kernel is already open-source, released mostly under the Apple Public Source license. It's the kernel for OS X and iOS.

Granted, there's not much userland...

But it does have things like NSArray, right?
There is an open source version of Foundation, so I don't see why not
Do you mean GNUStep?
Yes I do, Also Swift 3.0 is supposed to ship Foundation. https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation
It runs without most of the libraries. The Linux version of Swift doesn't have AppKit / UIKit either.
Codeplex still exists?