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  • Pessimism - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    Key differentiator: Microsoft put forth the effort to bring .NET Core to Linux AND MAC, Apple conveniently only bothered to port Swift to Linux and left Windows out in the cold.
  • jasonelmore - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    Then that's their mistake. it will never be taken seriously in enterprise.
  • extide - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    X2, this language will be used for little more than silly little games and simple apps.
  • chaynes89 - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    Some of those silly little games are bringing in over $90k per day
  • Intervenator - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    Those silly games and simple apps bring in 10B a year for Apple alone. You should think about why X2 was created, rather than look down on it for what it was created for.
  • DanNeely - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    While they're happy to sell to big businesses, Apple's repeatedly shown they don't really care about the enterprise market.
  • ComeOnNow - Wednesday, May 17, 2017 - link

    Enterprise isn't even a tech thing. It's a business construct. It's irrelevant what IT thinks about the product it chooses to support--none of that is used by anyone changing anything anyway (in tech) it's just business that is affected and tech only indirectly. MSFT isn't so much a tech company, but an aggregator and reseller. They have invented or pioneered almost nothing that was successful. Are you new to tech?
  • eoerl - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    LLVM back end, shouldn't be rocket science to have it working on windows if any big player is interested. It merely recognises the fact that in the short term on windows nobody cares
  • KoolAidMan1 - Saturday, December 5, 2015 - link

    Do you have any idea how much programming happens on Linux and OS X?

    This aren't clerical duties we're talking about
  • easp - Monday, December 7, 2015 - link

    Its hard to take anyone seriously who makes such self-important declarations.

    Also, consider that maybe apple has a big partner who will handle the enterprise-side.
  • genzai - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    uhhh, its open source. If people want it on windows, they can port it.
  • IanHagen - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    RemObjects's Silver already does a fairly okay job running Swift on Windows. I believe we'll see very good ports now that it has been opensourced.
  • ComeOnNow - Wednesday, May 17, 2017 - link

    Exactly, but Windows users are going to hate anyone daring to use anything else (it doesn't matter if it's way better they will wait for MSFT to copy it or they won't bother).
  • solipsism - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    I fail to see what you're arguing against with your "key differentiator" comment since there is no comparison in the blog post to Microsoft or .Net.
  • dsumanik - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    He's highlighting the fundamental difference behind the two organizations. Microsoft, and Google make significant attempts to make their API's available on almost any platform. Now, it doesn't always work out to perfection, but the point is they invest significant resources to do so, to the point of trying to corner and dominate market segments in the coding world.

    Apple on the other hand just looks after itself, helps no one in any way shape or form. Apple jst says here you guys go it's open source now, your'e so welcome. Oh by the way the next version is going to totally break everything just a heads up.

    If you are a developer which path would you chose?
  • solipsism - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    It's funny that you believe that any for-profit company's objective is anything but how to benefit their bottom line.
  • dsumanik - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    Its Ok, you are obviously not a dev and didn't understand what the big kids were talking about in the first place. Back to the app store for you, it's safer there and you can do more good for apple stocks buy giving them oney that you ever will on the anandtech comments section lol. Apple is the only company you have yto pay to develop products for lol. It really is a joke.
  • dsumanik - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    If you are wondering why that last post was so garbled.. well you can blame apple aiuto correct...just sayin.
  • solipsism - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    Of course. How could it be your fault¡
  • solipsism - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    "Apple is the only company you have yto pay to develop products for"

    You're saying no other company takes a percentage or has another fees associated with their store or dev tools? (I just want to make sure that's exactly what you mean before I reply again)
  • IanHagen - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    As far as I remember I had to pay several other companies to develop for them in the past. Heck, Microsoft even used to charge the price of a satisfactory second hand car for Visual Studio not so long ago. And even the "new" Microsoft under Nadella was more than happy to take me 50 bucks for the privilege of publishing apps on the Windows store.
  • name99 - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    I'm sorry. Big kids you said?
    What was the income of Apple last year? And Microsoft? And Google? Uh, OK...

    There were people who said Apple had no chance of competing with "serious" cellphone manufacturers.
    There were people who said Apple was being stupid imagining they could design a CPU competitive with ARM, or Qualcomm, or Intel.
    You want to go for the trifecta and claim that Apple don't have a hope of designing a language that will work better than our current offerings for the domain of general UI-heavy applications?

    "Apple is the only company you have yto pay to develop products for lol."
    You clearly understand fsckall about this space. Consoles, for example, have extremely onerous dev payments. MS charges developers for a one-time registration. Apple offers free developer accounts. etc etc
    It's all in the details, and the details have changed and will doubtless change again.
  • dsumanik - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    apple charges a 100 bucks a year, just so you can write programs that make money for them.

    Thats all i know, LOL
  • easp - Monday, December 7, 2015 - link

    You know less than you think. LOL

    XCode is free, or more precisely, its free if you've got a Mac. That's all you need to write Mac apps. The fees basically come when you want to sign your apps. Signing is required for even side-loaded iOS apps (unless you want to jailbreak, optional for MacOS apps, and required for distribution through either the Mac or iOS app store.

    The revenue from developers fees probably isn't material to Apple on its own, but it is important for another reason: It discourages developers with bad intentions, while being almost inconsequential to most others. Paying the fee imposes a cost on spammy/abusive developers, and also helps pin down their identity so it is harder for them to hide behind a new developer account.

    I realize that there are edge cases. Among them, I suspect there are more who have a "principled" objection to the fee than their are who simply can't afford it.
  • chaynes89 - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    "Apple only looks out for itself"

    Last year they paid out over $25B to iOS devs
  • solipsism - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    If they didn't pay out what they are contracted to pay there would be lawsuits, developers would leave, and of course bad press as a result. None of those things are good for Apple's bottom-line, especially when taken as a whole.
  • jasonelmore - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    no, consumers paid out over 25B to iOS dev's.. Apple took 30% of it
  • IanHagen - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    My wife is an doll artisan and every online platform she uses to sell her work do charge a healthy percentage on it. I'm a "software artisan", if you'll allow me to call me that, and Apple, Microsoft and Google, all of them, do the same when I sell my software in their platforms. I see absolutely no problem with it.
  • easp - Monday, December 7, 2015 - link

    Yeah, when people first started bitching about Apple's cut, back in the iTunes Music Store days, I didn't get it, I figured the people doing the complaining were either disingenuous, or stupid, because I'm sure that traditional resale and wholesale markups worked out to 50-60% of the actual selling price.

    Plus, the credit card companies/banks always get their due, and that's coming out of Apple's 30%.
  • BurntMyBacon - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    @jasonelmore: "no, consumers paid out over 25B to iOS dev's.. Apple took 30% of it."

    If I recall correctly consumers paid out over 35.5B of which 25B went to devs and over 10.5B went to Apple. Pretty sure that was a profitable arrangement for Apple all things considered.
  • robco - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    In exchange for covering hosting, bandwidth, transaction fees, providing development tools, etc.
  • dsumanik - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    actually, apple charges you the developer 100 bucks a year, just for the opportunity to take 30% of the money you would make normally.

    It's funny how IOS devs think they are something special, when really all they are doing is learning how to use an API, lol
  • solipsism - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    "actually, apple charges you the developer 100 bucks a year, just for the opportunity to take 30% of the money you would make normally."

    No they don't. You're free to use their tools and docs, make a Mac app, and distribute anywhere you wish without Paying Apple a dime. It's only if you choose to use the Mac App Store do you have to pay 30% for your Mac app.
  • robco - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    Google charges $25 and also takes a cut.

    Unless you've written every piece of code in the stack, all you too are doing is learning how to use tools created by others. But I'm sure you wrote your own programming language, compiler, editor, etc.
  • jasonelmore - Saturday, December 5, 2015 - link

    and make you buy a $1500+ Apple machine on top of 30%
  • IanHagen - Monday, December 7, 2015 - link

    What a salty comment. Tell me, how is Cocoa development any different from Android, Rails, Java EE, .NET, Django, etc? Writing software on top of an framework (which is different from an API) is similar across the board. The only funny thing in here is the rubbish you're writing.
  • easp - Monday, December 7, 2015 - link

    Hosting/bandwidth/transaction fees, etc, are all significant costs. Costs are only half the equation though. For most developers, Apple also provides a lot of value by making a market for iOS apps.
  • OreoCookie - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    Microsoft and Google make these attempts because of iOS, and you need a Mac to develop for iOS. So from that perspective it's clear why Microsoft and Google do what they do, and it's not because they have a fundamentally different attitude towards open source, it's that this is what their goals require. To misconstrue that as altruism is misleading. Excluding Windows at this point makes sense to me: Swift on other platforms seems better suited to projects that do not require a native GUI. Instead, I reckon it'll be used first for back end stuff, not exactly Windows forte.

    Developers should choose whatever gets the job done. Soon plenty of people will know how to program in Swift because this is where iOS and OS X are going. So being able to use Swift on other platforms will allow programmers to re-use their skills and potentially even their code. That actually sounds quite enticing, but of course only time will tell.

    People forget that Apple is behind one of the most successful open source projects there is, WebKit. So while some of their open source efforts are meh (Darwin) others are indeed very popular. In principle, open sourcing Swift (which is part of a larger trend, see .NET) is beneficial for the company because it in principle allows for it to be used much more broadly. If you read Apple's documentation, they provide a guidance what features to expect in 3.0, and one of the major features is a stable ABI. Hence, from 3.0 on things should not “totally break”. We have no idea how they will react to community input and whether it will be successful, only time will tell. But IMHO they are doing the right thing.
  • IanHagen - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    What excites me the most is that companies as RemObjects which makes really nice cross-platform portings of programming languages will be further empowered with Swift being open-sourced. I really like the idea of using Xamarin and C# to develop for three platforms at once and I prefer Swift to C#, so the prospect of a Swift version of Xamarin really, really appeals me.
  • ciparis - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    "If you are a developer which path would you chose?"

    I chose the path with the most paying app-users.
  • fluxtatic - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    What happens if something happens to Apple? Don't me wrong, good on ya if you're actually making money developing on iOS, but Apple seems a little insane to me. You have to have a Mac to compile for OS X and iOS. Last I heard, you had to have a Mac to sell product on iTunes...wtf? Obviously it hasn't hurt Apple any, but I hate the mentality. At least some smart buggers thought to buy up a bunch of Mac hardware and rent out time on it so you're not forced to buy Apple's hardware to develop for iOS/OS X.
  • ws3 - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    Do you really think it would be cheaper to rent time on a Mac than simply buy a Mac Mini outright?
  • IanHagen - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    Well yes, but last time I checked I couldn't make native C# "modern" apps on OS X either. I could do some half backed work with mono, though. Isn't Microsoft's case exactly the same? Without Windows and Visual Studio you're out of luck for developing for the new Windows "universal" ecosystem. Only Google seems reasonable about supporting different development platforms, and that's probably because they don't own a healthy development-capable ecosystem.
  • IanHagen - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    Oh, about being "forced" to buy Apple hardware, I did most of my development on a hackintosh before deciding to buy myself Apple branded hardware.
  • Fleeb - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    Try breaking things in the enterprise and you would see where java is coming from.
  • IanHagen - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    I'm not saying that Java's philosophy haven't a place. It's just a bloody shame to have to live with it in more vibrant and dynamic, less boring environments.
  • BillBear - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    IBM has developed a system whereby the only thing you need to give Swift development a go is a web browser.

    Your code compiles and runs in a docker container containing the open source version of Swift on IBM's server.

    https://developer.ibm.com/swift/2015/12/03/introdu...
  • IanHagen - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    As a developer I'm willing to put up with Swift breaking things up every new version in order to bring us meaningful changes. Loot at Java, for example. Always so obsessed with maintaining pristine backwards compatibility at the cost of new features being bland and half-backed. One particular case was when I got excited about Java finally getting lambdas just to discover that it's no more than syntactic sugar over anonymous functions, the culprit again being that implementing *actual* lambdas would break legacy code.
  • val1984 - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    I remember a time, not so long ago, when .net was only available on Windows. Swift is really young compared to .net, Windows support is bound to happen, with or without Apple (like Mono pioneered non-Windows platforms for .net).
  • eoakst - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    .Net was launched in 2002 and .Net Core was announced in 2014, it appears that not too much effort was put forth.
  • BillBear - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    We've known that Microsoft was working on a Swift compiler since their Build conference back in May.

    http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-also-worki...
  • name99 - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    And how has that worked out for MS? Exactly how many .NET apps run on your average Mac?

    Apple aren't doing this for the enterprise market, or to make it easier to port Mac/iOS apps to Windows.
    I'm guessing they're doing it essentially to pull into their eco-system (over the next few years) the best young developers. They're hoping those developers will, just for fun, try Swift on Linux, conclude it's actually a very nice language to work in, and eventually decide they'd like to work with it using a full-featured toolset (XCode) and collection of frameworks.

    They may be a similar play involved wrt universities, national labs, and suchlike. Those may be populated by individuals who want to write Swift code (and fully expect to do it on Macs) but legal and similar reasons require that any languages they use have to be "open" for some definition of open.
  • CalaverasGrande - Thursday, April 14, 2016 - link

    OSX is based on BSD. You can open up a CLI and use 95% of Unix/Linux commands natively.
    Porting to Linux is a gimme, as Linux is open source and well documented. Porting to Windows not so much.
  • ComeOnNow - Wednesday, May 17, 2017 - link

    You can't be serious, or even know how to spell Mac. MSFT has been the one to leave Apple out constantly. You can't actually care about running any decent development environment if you are on Windows. MSFT having their foot on Apple's throat with their monopoly 'productivity' squite was their entire business strategy really. Leave some important bits out of the Mac versions (where Office originated BTW, since the initial versions were way beyond what MSFT's primitive systems could support) and also threaten to 'remove support' (until Apple had MSFT dead to rights for having copied Quicktime).
  • taharvey - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    .NET is stuck in a VM runtime. Swift is native. Swift will have big ramifications in systems and application development. Microsoft's .NET will still be relegated to corporate inter-web solutions like it is now (I run more variety of applications than anyone I know. Don't think a single one is using .NET)
  • TristanSDX - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    Look like Swift is also managed, not native
  • Brandon Chester - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    Swift code is compiled to machine language by LLVM. You may be thinking of LLVM's intermediate bitcode, which is just used for common code generation.
  • lmcd - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    .NET Roslyn also can deliver compiled code...
  • TristanSDX - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    Managed means that app requires runtime enviroment, while unmanaged requires only OS or just hardware. Intermediate vs native code is other dimension. For example NET Native apps are still managed, with native code.
  • JoeMonco - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    How exactly does it look like that? It would only look like that to someone completely ignorant of it.
  • mr_tawan - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    How about Swift -> .NET IL compiler ?
  • jimbo2779 - Thursday, December 3, 2015 - link

    Also there is .NET native so the talk about .NET always being in a VM will be going away very soon.
  • IanHagen - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    I absolutely love Swift. For years I've been steadfast on Ruby being the language that pleased me the most when working with and nurtured a visible admiration for C#, but Swift managed to quickly become my favourite working tool. I couldn't be happier to see it being open sourced.
  • Communism - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    Being enamored by apple backend is a dangerous business, as they trump even google at the rate that they deprecate support for anything and everything in their software stack.

    Have fun rewriting your code every time they push an update to Swift :P
  • IanHagen - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    The jump from Swift 1.2 to Swift 2 was quite seamless. Xcode did 95% of the job fixing syntax discrepancies. My hand work was about the new exception system, having to catch error in a few classes. It didn't take that long. I didn't love it, but I still think that the effort was worth it when I compare to how it feels to have to think in, let's say, Java. I honestly think it's a shame I can't use Swift besides Cocoa development.
  • nmodin - Thursday, December 17, 2015 - link

    I have to agree. I've been doing Java development since the last millennia, and just so happened to get involved with som iOS related work a few years back. Not really a fan of Objective-C I must say, but you get used to it. Now with Swift you really see what a good language should give you. Kotlin for Android looks a lot like it, and imho that doesn't mean that Google copied Apple or vice versa. It makes Kotlin a good modern language as is Swift. I'd say that most of the people here "bickering and arguing about who killed who" should grow up, and take interest in programming rather than moronic bitching about platforms/companies and who has the bigger proverbial ****.
  • nmodin - Thursday, December 17, 2015 - link

    And yes, the changes so far has been un-fun, but very far from unmanageable. I'd also say that there is a big chance the changes will be less intrusive moving forward as Swift only been around a year and as all new languages SHOULD change based on user feedback.
  • Communism - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    Lol @ the apple circle jerk in the comments on every one of the articles that pertain even peripherally to apple.

    Anand and Brian are gone guys, your job of getting them apple brownie points is done. Shoo.
  • ciderrules - Friday, December 4, 2015 - link

    Lol @ the poor upset troll whining about Apple articles.
  • Michael Bay - Saturday, December 5, 2015 - link

    Going by your reaction, he`s totally right.

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