“RemObjects is using its experience with compilers to allow developers to use Apple’s Swift coding language for Android development,” Benjamin Mayo reports for 9to5Mac.
“Previously, the company did something similar for C# and now the company is tackling Swift,” Mayo reports. “Silver allows app makers to write in the Swift language (which is still in its infancy, really) but code against the API’s and frameworks of non-Apple platforms.”
Read more in the full article here.
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Yuck.
WRONG! This is EXACTLY what Apple wanted to happen. They want developers to adopt swift. Most cross-platform development happens in a more expressive and easy to deal with language, like C#. Swift has enough C#-like features to make developers happy.
Swift is a cool language, but they need stuff like this to become a major language. The easier you make it for devs to work in your native language, the better the apps are going to be for your platform.
I don’t think so.
Apple has always preferred to persuade developers to take advantage of the unique qualities their platform has (compared to the others). This was the reason for the fierce opposition to Flash. Their arguments are easy to digest: using all these cross-platform tools significantly diminishes the advantages of iOS (or Mac OS X) as a unified hardware/OS platform by limiting developers to the features only available on all platforms (i.e. lowest common denominator), which essentially brings down iOS / Mac OSX to the level of Android / Windows. Apple has always much preferred that their developers use Apple’s own tools (and they made it easy by simplifying porting their effort to all Apple hardware.
Apple still has it’s proprietary APIs and OS to program to. I think that the more developers that adopt Swift will be an overall gain for Apple.
You seem not understand critical parts of how app development works.
All the Apple exclusive hardware and features are tied to Apple specific API’s (Cocoa on iOS), not the language (Swift, Objective C, or C on iOS).
The language Swift, like C, is a general purpose language. No part of its design is tied to any specific platform. Developers using Swift on Android or Windows would still have to use same Android API or Windows API, instead of using the Apple specific API Cocoa.
More developers learning Swift and adopting it on other platforms would in no way threaten Apple’s vertical integration model, and it would clearly be a good thing for Apple if the app developer community had more general knowledge and experience programming with Swift.
I think Apple will like this as they need more developers with the likes of the new IBM/Apple agreements.
There’s also the fact that Flash is outdated and needed to die.
Hope they’re only hoping to target CISC processors because… You know… You can’t take code written in one language and compile it both for CISC and RISC.
/s
As Alan Turing observed almost seven decades ago, any task that is performable on one general purpose computing device is performable on any other. That doesn’t mean it can be done as quickly, effectively, or efficiently. The NSA could do complex cryptography on a Raspberry Pi, but it would take centuries. Obviously, a program written in a processor-agnostic high level language can be compiled to run on either RISC or CISC processors, but that doesn’t mean it will run as well on both.
On top of that, there are a lot of existing programs that aren’t really processor agnostic. A programmer who knows a trick to make his program run faster or better on a particular machine or compiler will usually play the trick, even if it makes the code less portable.
Those factors (and others) mean that translating a program from iOS to Android or Intel to ARM is not just a matter of running the same Swift code through a compiler with a couple of flags reset.
“any task that is performable on one general purpose computing device is performable on any other”
My sarcastic point exactly 🙂
Which is why my series will never have a video game attached to it. I never ever want to see my comic series displayed on a Windows or Android device! Sometimes, I just wish it was possible to make websites that worked on only one OS.
It is actually precisely what Microsoft succeeded in with IE…
Thus- EVIL.
Isn’t that illegal?
Awesome. Rem Objects makes some great compilers.
Their C# and Object Pascal compilers are very well done.
I like their approach to cross-platform and am looking forward to seeing what they come up with.