Swift is coming, Swift is coming

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 16:17:45 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 November 2015 at 16:02:18 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
>>> Server Swift might really end up as a niche within a niche.
>>
>> Or it might end up becoming really popular, as a compiled, 
>> modern language that can be used on mobile and the server.
>>
>> I don't really care how Swift does or follow it, but it will 
>> be competition for D, as it has generics, unlike Go, and 
>> doesn't have Rust's unfamiliar syntax or stringent emphasis on 
>> memory safety.  It's an up-and-coming competitor for D people 
>> to watch out for.
>
> With Apple behind it, it might become popular, but not 
> necessarily in the OSS community. What if Apple started to make 
> their own Apple specific extensions that are not open sourced 
> and have to be backengineered on Linux. Then Swift would end up 
> like OpenStep, wouldn't it?

I don't see Apple doing all that stuff nowadays.  This move to 
open-source Swift and port it to linux seems driven by the llvm 
devs, I doubt the company really cares.  Apple open-sourced their 
ARM64 backend for llvm last year, despite it being better than 
the incomplete OSS backend being worked on in llvm and providing 
a competitive advantage for their 64-bit ARM devices, so that I 
can now use it for Android too.  Of course, there are a _lot_ 
less Android/Aarch64 devices than iOS.

Apple really had no incentive to do that from a competitive 
standpoint, other than maybe the llvm devs at Apple not wanting 
to maintain two Aarch64 backends.  Yet, they did it anyway.  I 
don't think they really care about keeping Swift to themselves 
when they're the largest company on the planet and are minting 
$53 billion in profits a year!  For context, that's only $15 
billion less than google's entire revenue over the last year, ie 
their profits alone are almost all much as all the money google 
brought in.

I don't think they're sitting around thinking about how to make a 
couple million off Swift. ;)