Comment Re:Unlikely (Score 5, Interesting) 270
I think a wholesale rewrite is unlikely, but I would guess that they are going to eventually do something about the GNU code they use. Apple doesn't like the GPLv3's patent clauses, so they have frozen all their imported GNU utilities at the latest GPLv2 version. Some of these are now getting quite old and not maintained upstream, so Apple has to handle even routine maintenance. They managed to transition off one big one by moving from gcc to clang/LLVM, but there is still a bunch of old GNU code shipped in the base system that I don't see them keeping forever. Now whether they rewrite it in Swift seems more questionable.