Apple Announces New Programming Language Called Swift

jmcbain (1233044) writes "At WWDC 2014 today, Apple announced Swift, a new programming language. According to a report by Ars Technica: 'Swift seems to get rid of Objective C's reliance on defined pointers; instead, the compiler infers the variable type, just as many scripting languages do. ... The new language will rely on the automatic reference counting that Apple introduced to replace its garbage-collected version of Objective C. It will also be able to leverage the compiler technologies developed in LLVM for current development, such as autovectorization. ... Apple showed off a couple of cases where implementing the same algorithm in Swift provided a speedup of about 1.3X compared to the same code implemented in Objective C.'" Language basics, and a few worthwhile comments on LtU.

Comments

Re:Good bye source compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Qt does not (and cannot) support Windows "Metro" (or whatever the name is for the C#/event driven/non Win32 environment now). By the same token it won't be able to support this new environment.

If we applied that standard to everything, we'd be stuck with Qt's obsolete and cumbersome programming model and UI in perpetuity. I, for one, am happy to jettison it once and for all.

Qt, XWidgets and others like them rely on basic C compatibility and certain common UI themes and primitives to be able to build cross-platform libraries and applications.

And people should care about this... why? Writing a UI in C/C++ is itself a questionable proposition. And if you really want a C++ toolkit, you can still provide it even if the UI tools are implemented in a completely different language and runtime (just have a look at HTML+JavaScript).

Translation: I work for an incompetent team

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently your "team" is too stupid to install GDB and too incompetent to write a string to select a font.

Re:Good bye source compatibility

[JustOK]

It's cute how people think it's "their" iphone.