Hi! I’m one of the engineers on this. We’ve got some work we’re collaborating on - all of which is going upstream - and we wanted a shared place to stage it while we prepare PRs. I’ll be pushing a statement to our fork tomorrow.
(I’m personally working on Bazel rules and contributions to lib/Syntax. If you find that exciting, please get in touch! :)
It's not a "made up title", Google did in fact fork Swift on GitHub. That doesn't mean anything in an of itself, thousands of people/organizations have also done so, but it's mildly interesting since it's Google, and because it was posted here, we now know why.
The problem is that "fork" means two different things at this point. Compare "FFmpeg developers fork FFmpeg" in the sense of "...and create libav" and in the sense of "...so they can submit pull requests." One is extremely newsworthy, one is extremely not. If you're posting something to HN, it's a reasonable assumption that readers will think you're posting a newsworthy thing as opposed to not.
From the heading I misunderstood google has forked the swift. I was little bit hurt, google always do same thing like they took WebKit and forked it and made it own version of browser instead of contributing back to webkit.
Facebook people also contribute to Swift but Facebook has no fork in their repository instead the person who contributes have in their own repo.
I have read somewhere steve jobs was very unhappy with this event and that is the reason they make their technologies close.
Swift is hard work of lot of people and Swift community, I really love the openness it brings in Apple. These types of incidents make them to rethink their decision and let developers like us to not involve in their choices.
Chris Lattner has done wonderful job to make community like this and if google misuse and made their own language out of hard work of swift community I do not think it is good for any of us.
I read google have not forked so I take my comment back as I cannot delete it.
This is being used as a staging place for putting patches so they can be turned into pull requests, nothing more. Sorry to bust any conspiracy theories.
(You can see this happens on >100 of the swift forks :P)
Those words are pretty literal, actually.
Which means I don't own Swift at Google, i just know what they are doing because i approved it another capacity :)
Thanks for response. Just curious - seems you saw this and replied in about 20 minutes of the post. Impressive speed. I know about google alerts etc and hacker news is popular, but curious how exactly you found this post so quickly? Someone saw it and pinged you or some automatic way?
I guess that's true, so i'll be explicit about that too:
These Google developers are working on Swift because they are part of a team that supports internal-facing IOS tooling.
(there really is nothing down this rabbit hole, FWIW)
One thing to realize, if you don't already, is that we have come to accept that everyone notices everything we do on github at this point (and further, we assume that people look to see what googlers are doing outside the google org as well, and that pretty much everything placed on github will leak, and ...)
If we were trying to keep something major under wraps, this would be an exceptionally bad way of achieving that.
The public docs we have even show that we discourage private github repos for various reasons. Our general internal answer would be "don't stage it on github at all unless you are willing to see it leak"
Google corporate policy, to the best of my knowledge (I do not and have never worked for Google but I asked lots of questions when evaluating an offer), is that it's significantly easier to let Google retain copyright on your open source work, and if it's on GitHub you have to host your repo at github.com/google if Google retains copyright.
("Forks" with no code changes ending up at the top of HN, as if they signaled a major shift in corpprate strategy, are an excellent example of why I think this is a bad policy. For all we know some Google employee PR'd a typo fix they noticed one weekend and has since deleted the branch.)
Anyone else think it’s dumb that you have to fork a repository just to submit a pull request? Why doesn’t GitHub let you do it in one command like ‘git push origin master:refs/pull/new’?
Perhaps this is the start of moving Android Apps to Swift.
Which, per rumor was considered last year:
"About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language for Android"
If I were Google I would just invest into the native, LLVM-backed Kotlin thing. I guess the advantage of Swift would be using 1 lang for 2 platforms but at the end of the day the APIs are different enough that idk if it would matter.
That would be great for developers like you and me -- after all, our skills are most valuable when they are portable. How much more can we get done if we don't have to support multiple platforms?
However, the interests of vendors are diametrically opposed to our interests as developers -- it is all about vendor lockin, and making it as hard as possible for us to support competing platforms.
I understand the theory, but in practice this means if you want to implement a competing platform... you just need to write a Swift target!
Much easier for developers to go check out your platform.
More unification would likely also mean better abstraction layers across platforms, meaning that competing platforms could rely on those abstraction layers.
Think about how nice it is that most devices out there are running at least a flavor of Unix. You have a base-level expectation of how things can be integrated. There are of course differences, but generally if you write your stuff in a certain way you can use it almost everywhere!
And for those who don't want to work on Unix, all you need is a compatability layer to bring over some useful tools. Just get that C compiler up and running and you get a lot of stuff too!
The reason this is different from other forms of platform lock-in is that ultimately things like programming languages don't cover the full stack, so there are "obvious" places where you can swap either your language, the stuff underneath, or the stuff above it.
maybe 'was'?
kotlin is the official google's recommendation for android now...
(and kotlin can have multiple 'backends' -- e.g. build-to-java / native / web / etc)
Kotlin could just be a stopgap, though. It’s still a JVM language so it’s an easier migration, and from what little I’ve seen it doesn’t add very much other than syntactic sugar for null checks.
I doubt Kotlin is a stop-gap measure, and it does a lot more than just give syntactic sugar for null checks. As the comment above you mentioned it's not only JVM, it has a JS backend and a fully native one which is developing very rapidly. Kotlin and Swift have a very significant overlap in language features, and with how strong the Kotlin community is, I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, I would sooner see multiplatform development embracing Kotlin over Swift, given how well it's progressing. Kotlin native hasn't even reached 1.0 yet, and they already made a very convincing showcase of how it can be used to develop server backend + frontend + android + iOS with significant code reuse, and not having to constantly switch language contexts: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlinconf-app
I don't know much about Swift. Has anyone written in it something they can demo? Can it write gui and web apps? What's the biggest problem it solves and how do you like the language?
There are some 1500 people in the Google organization, so presumably just one of them pressed fork and selected the org accidentally. GitHubs UI makes this super easy.
If Chris Lattner (Swift Creator) is behind this. I am more than ok, else I do not think this is the process. You should raise proposal to swift community and if it gets accepted you start working on it.
Not other way around. You create fork and try to push and if they does not agree with you. You will say ok we are having our own fork.
reply
"Google is said to be considering Swift as a ‘first class’ language for Android"
"About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language for Android"
I guess that title is little controversial. For people unfamiliar with GitHub process it may sound like Google prepares their own version of Swift (which is not a case as explained in the top comment).
(I’m personally working on Bazel rules and contributions to lib/Syntax. If you find that exciting, please get in touch! :)