So back in the day, if someone wanted to do a public implementation of a closed language, they’d look at the docs and spec (if available), and start building it themselves with GCC, LLVM (recent history), or other compiler tools of their choice.
Is that sort of thing not likely to happen anymore in an Oracle-sues-you-for-headers world?
I haven’t seen much in the way of chilling effects from Oracle (and before that, SCO). Back in the day, people used to use linked lists, but apparently there’s a patent for that? Hasn’t appeared to stop people from using linked lists.
This seems like a lot of fuss and worry about a language that’s not really even out yet (I’ll consider Swift truly released when ios 8 ships).
Developers with that policy don’t write apps for Apple platforms (unless there’s more cross-platform Objective-C programming going on than I’m aware of), so I imagine that won’t have much effect on Swift.
So back in the day, if someone wanted to do a public implementation of a closed language, they’d look at the docs and spec (if available), and start building it themselves with GCC, LLVM (recent history), or other compiler tools of their choice.
Is that sort of thing not likely to happen anymore in an Oracle-sues-you-for-headers world?
I haven’t seen much in the way of chilling effects from Oracle (and before that, SCO). Back in the day, people used to use linked lists, but apparently there’s a patent for that? Hasn’t appeared to stop people from using linked lists.
This seems like a lot of fuss and worry about a language that’s not really even out yet (I’ll consider Swift truly released when ios 8 ships).
I suspect that there are a lot of developers (myself included) who won’t look at Swift until there is a cross-platform, open source implementation.
I agree, but I would imagine those who are already part of the Apple app ecosystem (developing apps, etc.) don’t mind as much one way or the other.
Developers with that policy don’t write apps for Apple platforms (unless there’s more cross-platform Objective-C programming going on than I’m aware of), so I imagine that won’t have much effect on Swift.