While we’re on the subject of Swift:
Fans of Apple’s Swift language can now use their newly developed skills to write software for systems supporting both .NET and Java, including Android.
The Silver compiler, currently in beta, compiles Swift programs to run in the .NET and Java runtimes. It can also produce native binaries to run on OS X. With Silver, Swift developers can share their business logic and non-interface code across the different platforms.
It’s a bit of an Apple news day today, isn’t it?
I do not want to be the naysayer. However given our history with Java and C# patent issues, and Apple specifically designing this language for its closed ecosystem, I cant help but fear potential future conflicts.
Could you please enlighten me about the history with C# patent issues?
The ones that specifically don’t exist I’m guessing? Or at least, the ones LINUX developers created because of FUD spread over C#, .Net and Microsoft in general.
What? C# is not involved here, the .NET platform is, which is now being open sourced.
No issues here.
Post and run!
There are no patent issues in generating Java or C# code, to my knowledge.
If you stick to the standard C# stuff (excluding the Windows GUI API, for instance) I think you’re just about safe, according to Microsoft’s patent promise.
There aren’t any patent issues coming from c# here. There may be Apple owned patents to worry about. I wonder how friendly Apple will be to something like this – my guess is not very.
The two major threats to a project like this are:
1. Apple could decide they don’t like it, and crush it.
2. The Silver developers, who are currently giving it away free (no revenue stream) could get tired, and move on, or never get it to commercial grade stability.
I’m certainly interested though. Looks like a great project.
The problem is that there are no “C# patents” or “Java patents”. Big corps. patented certain features of .NET/C# or Java/JVM in a generic form, which (in theory) means that you might violate such a patent in a totally different technology not related to the one being the source of the patent. For example your favorite Python, Ruby, Go, OCaml, JS or whatever you use… compiler/interpreter might violate a “.NET patent” or more precisely, for example a patent belonging to Microsoft on a certain feature of constructing garbage collector, that happens to be used by .NET.
But in this particular case the only scary part involved might be Apple. There are many free and non-free languages/compilers/code generators for both .NET and Java living happily without legal issues.
As for Apple – it’s pretty clear that they try to keep the ecosystem closed. You are suppose to be developing apps on OS X for iOS and OS X. I don’t knew if they will attack it with patents. There are many better forms of legal actions like different forms of copyrights, intellectual property (not necessarily patents) and so on…