Re: GNUstep's lack of progress and Apple's holding back Swift language

[Maxthon Chan]

Too bad my current job is a bit overwhelming or I would like to contribute to a 
refactor/rewrite of CoreBase and Base, shifting code around to make it support 
the mix of ARC and Toll-free bridging, as well as bring features up on par with 
Yosemite. After this refactor CoreBase and Base will have to be built together 
on top of a fork of David’s libobjc (the same dependency tree and arrangement 
as Apple’s libraries,) although they are still separate binaries if built. I 
want to do this because my personal projects depend on it (CGIKit, an “AppKit 
meets ASP.net” kind of project using Objecitve-C, won’t be really useful if 
cannot be deployed on Linux servers.)

iCloud-related API can be implemented using Dropbox or Google Drive as the 
backing storage, and for Chinese users (in where both Google and Dropbox is not 
accessible,) Baidu Cloud, as the backing service. XPC I still have no idea how 
to do appropriately though.

> On Apr 2, 2015, at 14:03, Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Maxthon,
> 
> On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 1:51 AM, Maxthon Chan <xcvista@me.com> wrote:
>> Dear fellows:
>> 
>> Is it possible that Apple is holding Swift from being released to public, 
>> despite its popularity and demand, have a bit of reason in GNUstep’s lack of 
>> progress?
> 
> I very seriously doubt Apple would hold back Swift for any reason
> related to GNUstep.  Also, I would love to know what you mean by lack
> of progress.  Admittedly progress has been slow, but not non-existant.
> Most of this is because people spend far too much time complaining
> about progress on the mailing list instead of coding. ;)
> 
> Apple is withholding Swift for one reason only and that is because
> they want to keep it Apple-only so that it makes applications less
> portable.  I'm sure Apple is not happy about companies such as
> Apportable making it very easy for people to port their apps to other
> mobile platforms.  Unfortunately the same demand does not exist on the
> Mac platform.
> 
>> Our libraries is still at the level of Lion maybe Snow Leopard, and 
>> obviously that won’t be able to support running Swift code.
> 
> Actually different parts of the code are at different levels depending
> on what was needed by various people.  Some classes are up to 10.9
> levels and others are still at 10.6 or 10.7.   As of yet, no one has
> done a full assessment of what level each class is at.   The MISSING
> file contains a list of all classes and methods which currently need
> to be implemented.
> 
> Swift is not dependant on any features which exist within the Cocoa
> APIs in 10.9 or 10.10.  I know this for two reasons:
> 
> 1) I'm implementing a swift compiler.
> 2) I've been working on an app using a mix of ObjC and Swift for the
> last few months.
> 
> Swift is dependant on the ObjC runtime and ours (the one by David
> Chisnall) is fully capable of supporting it.  So, as for GNUstep not
> being able to support running Swift code that's not true.
> 
>> Max.
> 
> Later,
> -- 
> Gregory Casamento
> GNUstep Lead Developer / OLC, Principal Consultant
> http://www.gnustep.org - http://heronsperch.blogspot.com
> http://ind.ie/phoenix/