> but is there a compelling reason we'd want Swift running on Android?
Yes because it's a language of higher level than C++ that can theoretically run on all platforms. Now I don't know about you but I'd much rather write the core of my software in a language that can be used on all platforms. This way I can leverage the same business logic everywhere and just have different, dedicated logic for UIs.
I once tried to use C++ for this but the STL is supremely lacking in almost every way compared to the standard libraries that come with almost every other language. There just isn't much choice out there.
> Surely it's easier to get a basic JVM running on the iOS?
Gah, I'm not sure how you'd do that and still be able to deploy an application to the iOS app store. I would imagine cross compiling Swift would be orders of magnitude easier.
Oh I hadn't seen that one, that's actually pretty neat. Their pricing is...interesting though. Zero company support at all for the solo package which seems insane to me but other than that it's pretty cool. I wonder how well it works and how it supports third party Java libraries (if at all).
Sure that's fair I was mostly commenting with porting the JVM versus bypassing it all together. I'd love to see more commercial support for compiling Java and other languages to native just so they can be more portable.
Yes because it's a language of higher level than C++ that can theoretically run on all platforms. Now I don't know about you but I'd much rather write the core of my software in a language that can be used on all platforms. This way I can leverage the same business logic everywhere and just have different, dedicated logic for UIs.
I once tried to use C++ for this but the STL is supremely lacking in almost every way compared to the standard libraries that come with almost every other language. There just isn't much choice out there.