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"
> I run all the production and cloud programming language teams at Google, and am also an open source lawyer.