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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Does "will be portable" include any notion of a cross-platform UI?

I think not, but im working on a application platform where the sdk is in swift. Im using the chrome runtime, so im binding into the chrome compositor, the same rendering engine that the webkit uses. This part is almost finished, and is rendering properly , i just need to finish creating the finished components(buttons, etc..) over the ui view.

Im trying to create a distributed application platform, using the bittorrent DHT for that.. so this is the part im working on right now.

I hope i can launch this in a couple of months from now, so swift can have a multiplatform UI and where applications can be distributed in a decentralized way.

Languages don't have UIs - frameworks do. I realise it's a pedantic distinction, but it's an important one.

I get the distinction, but there appears to be a deliberate direction to make Swift more portable. Thus, I was curious if that effort might include something UI related in the future. The interest level would certainly spike up if something were available.

But, that wouldn't make any sense to include UI components in a programming language. And I think the interest level is already "spiked".

Okay. I was under the (perhaps not true) impression that the vast majority of swift apps were iphone apps, with the apple specific UI bindings. Such that one of the first questions on a new platform (Linux, Android, etc) would be "how do I create the UI?".

It sounds like instead, the cross platform appeal is that back end or background services can now be written on non-apple platforms?

That's correct. UIKit isn't like, baked into Swift. Whatever platform you're writing for would need to provide to you UI components and then some.

Porting Foundation is much more important than any UI.

I don't think anyone is disputing that. Just asking if it's part of a larger plan, or not.

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