I'm interesting in your background: which languages do you use, and what kind of programs do you write? Perhaps it'll become clearer whether C++ is any use to you or not.
From the discussion I've read in this thread so far, it seems like you're claiming "what's the point of the entire field of mechanical engineering" when you, personally, just want to drive a car (not build one), fly on a plane (not build one) and so on.
> I'm interesting in your background: which languages do you use
Scala, Java, C#, Obj-C / Swift, Python, JS.
> what kind of programs do you write?
At work : line of business, database / search / indexing systems, mobile apps, web apps
At home : mobile apps, indie games
> it seems like you're claiming "what's the point of the entire field of mechanical engineering" when you, personally, just want to drive a car (not build one), fly on a plane (not build one) and so on.
You've misunderstood. What I'm claiming is that there are very few tasks at hobby-project scale that C++ is ideally suited for. C++ is a language that's used at team-scale, and is no longer an approachable language for the individual.
In other words, with Java you can build Android apps, with C# you can build Unity games, with Python / JavaScript / Whatever you can build web apps.
What can the individual do with C++ they couldn't do easier faster or better with some other language? Maybe embedded systems - but C seems just as effective for that domain. Likewise for kernel development for obvious reasons.
I actually want a reason to use C++, but "well you can work on Photoshop or high performance computing or HFT plumbing software" is not a helpful answer - both for me and anyone else hoping to pick up Cpp in their spare time.
Well if you're looking for anecdotal evidence: my last hobby project (OCR for a specific book+script), I used Mathematica to prototype (fast iteration) and C++ with OpenCV to implement it (way faster execution).
I started the project in Python but switched because it wasn't particularly good at anything vs. the combination of Mathematica and C++. Actually I prototyped it in C++ too before doing some extra analysis in Mathematica only because it had some algorithms that OpenCV didn't.
What I would love to see is something that replaces Chromium with WebKit/Safari in Electron apps. I'm sure that'll make everything faster, or at least easy on battery life.
It might take only 30 sec to tweet about it, but with open-sourcing comes a lot of stuff to deal with: once it goes open, there will be forks and pull requests and what not. Apple probably isn't yet ready to do fully open development (like they do with LLVM) of Swift.
Did you not actually read the comment you replied to? The entire point was that they haven't even said "We intend to open-source Swift once we're ready." The last we heard, they hadn't even considered open-sourcing it, like, ever.
(To clarify for people who like to misread things, I did not just say "They expressly intend to never open-source it." I said that, last we heard, they had not even talked about ever open-sourcing it.)
Why should they waste 30 seconds on that? To satisfy you? Very few people really care about this. If they say anything and then it takes longer to deliver than they thought those people will jump down their throat. Better to say nothing and announce when ready.
Give it time, I think it will be open. It's just not 100% finished yet, despite what Apple says.
The Xcode 5.1 sources include clang, lldb etc. We just need to wait for Xcode 6 sources to be up, pretty sure it'll include Swift.
Also worthy of note is that most of these packages are under BSD/APSL license, which doesn't mandate Apple to release the sources at all (e.g. the OS X kernel xnu is fully open source). Yet they do it. Google's version of "open" Android development isn't any different, they develop in private and dump the code to AOSP only once a particular version is 'finished'.
