Hey guys, do you know if swift will be ever open-sourced? After the WWDC they said that was early to think about it while in beta. So, what's the status now?
You can't even build Xamarin's sample project without demoing a commercial license, because the sample project is falls outside the app size restriction.
Actually there is. One of the big selling points of Go is its ability to produce self contained binaries. Swift would share this but also be a language that is more full featured.
GNUStep failure is more to do with Objective-C being such an odd language for most people.
Fond memories. I used to use WindowMaker on my old RH 6.2 system (or was it 7?), maybe even Fedora 1. But I never understood the dock - I was expecting a Windows-style task bar and the dock really isn't that.
The fact that it sat beneath other windows meant you had to constantly shift windows to get to it, which I found frustrating. Likely a configuration option?
It probably runs excellently on modern hardware, albeit with no GPU acceleration or anything to reduce main CPU cycles.
Apple opensoucred their Objective-C compiler only because the GPL on the GCC forced them. They invested a lot in the BSD licenced LLVM. I don't think they did this just for fun, but to avoid they have to do that.
It was streamed in the open HTTP Live Streaming protocol. It just so happens that the only web browser that implements it in Safari. Worked fine in VLC.
Is there any other way to do live streams embedded on a web page without a proprietary Flash plugin?
Hardly open. It'd be like if Google rewrote the Gmail frontend to native dart and then just blamed the other browsers for not having a native Dart VM. Dart is even standardized (by ECMA), unlike HLS which isn't standardized.
I would be interested in a Swift port for Linux server-side/command line dev. Not so much client UI dev. Swift on Linux servers could help Apple sell more Macbooks to developers.
And Microsoft puts money on F#, Haskell and OCaml, all of which already have better Linux support.
Swift is great for pushing functional programming down the throat to mainstream developers that wish to target iOS, but it is no more pragmatic than OCaml or F#.
For the OP use case, targeting Linux server software is already better served by the languages I mentioned.
If Apple decides/realizes Swift was a bad idea, you will be out of luck with your codebase. Unlike open source where users can continue the work of the corporation.
It would enable porting to other platforms, and it's also just useful to be able to look at how things implemented. I've benefitted a lot from being able to look at the Objective-C runtime source code, for example, because I can see how things work or where things go wrong.