News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Swift 5 Release Notes for Xcode 10.2. Parent comment

Re:Swift 5 Release Notes for Xcode 10.2 by zapzupnz on Tuesday March 26, 2019 @12:56AM (#19489402)
Yeah, UIKit and SpriteKit will never come to other platforms. They constitute part of iOS' and macOS' competitive advantage.

Swift's progress also has little to bear on that front as UIKit and SpriteKit are written in C, Objective-C, and C++; their use in Swift depends on Apple's Objective-C runtime which is not released as part of the non-macOS/iOS port of Swift for Linux.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Swift 5 Release Notes for Xcode 10.2 by saagarjha on Tuesday March 26, 2019 @02:12AM (#19489625)
To be fair, libobjc is open-source: https://opensource.apple.com/source/objc4/objc4-750.1/
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Swift 5 Release Notes for Xcode 10.2 by pjmlp on Tuesday March 26, 2019 @03:22AM (#19489835)
That is a very tiny part of Objective-C story.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Swift 5 Release Notes for Xcode 10.2 by zapzupnz on Tuesday March 26, 2019 @04:57AM (#19490172)
Indeed. I don't think Apple would open source Foundation, App Kit, UI Kit, and a bunch of other things; that by itself precludes inclusion with Swift. Aside from that, a lot of those things rely on the full version of Core Foundation in C; I think the (open source, non-Swift) implementation of Core Foundation, CF Lite, is heavily reduced compared to what ships with Apple's OSs and would make an ineffective base for redundantly reimplementing those frameworks on other systems.
[ Parent | on HN ]