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Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by untog on Monday June 08, 2015 @02:41PM (#9681239)
It's better than Objective C, so I like it. But if iOS was open to every language I doubt people would be paying much attention to it.
Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by Tloewald on Monday June 08, 2015 @03:07PM (#9681464)
Yeah it's only possible to write iOS apps with C, C++, C#, Ruby, Javascript, Python, LUA...
Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by untog on Monday June 08, 2015 @03:24PM (#9681606)
Not with first-class support is isn't.
Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by coldtea on Monday June 08, 2015 @03:48PM (#9681822)
So? Is there any platform that has first class support for more than 1-2 languages?
Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by djur on Monday June 08, 2015 @04:24PM (#9682127)
Unix. The 'native' language there is C but there are dozens of languages that are well-supported. They can interoperate through OS-level abstractions like pipes and via C APIs on at the process level. The average Unix desktop or server is probably running code written in 5-10 languages, more or less transparently to the user.
Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by coldtea on Monday June 08, 2015 @05:07PM (#9682421)
First, you said with first class support from the vendor. Linux doesn't offer that for any language.

Second, that's not an app development platform. Gnome has C (and it's own unholy stack on top), KDE has C++.

You can code for OS X/iOS in all kinds of languages too, if you mean at the OS and not at the app development level.

Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by djur on Monday June 08, 2015 @08:30PM (#9683393)
I'm afraid you have me confused with another commenter regarding the 'first-class support' issue.

If "platform" means "app development platform" and that means "full-featured toolkit for the development of GUI applications that run in an integrated environment", then I would agree both that Gnome and KDE fit that bill and that they have limited language support (in my experience the only language worth using with those toolkits other than the respective C and C++ is Python).

Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by Tloewald on Monday June 08, 2015 @05:42PM (#9682657)
> They can interoperate through OS-level abstractions like pipes and via C APIs on at the process level.

And you can't do this in OSX or iOS?

> The average Unix desktop or server is probably running code written in 5-10 languages, more or less transparently to the user

The average iPhone is probably running code written in just as many (if not more) languages - C, C++, Obj-C, Swift, and Javascript are a given before you even look at third party stuff. And, modulo sandboxing, you can do all the Unix stuff too.

Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by djur on Monday June 08, 2015 @08:21PM (#9683354)
Sandboxing is a pretty big modulo.

I actually don't have any opinion on how many languages have 'first-class' support on iOS. My understanding is that it's somewhat more complicated to create natural-seeming bindings from other languages to Objective-C APIs than it would be for C APIs, and that there are restrictions in the type of applications you can distribute using other languages (no downloadable code outside the App Store). Whether that makes those languages not 'first-class' on the platform is up to interpretation.

But the person I was responding to was specifically asking if any platform had first-class support for more than 1-2 languages. I don't know how to determine 'first-class' as a matter of principle, but I assumed that the multiple decades of polyglot software development on Unix environments would count. (OS X would count there, by the way.)

Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by Tloewald on Tuesday June 09, 2015 @08:21AM (#9685423)
Sandboxing affects obj-c and swift code too.