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Apple Announces New Programming Language Called Swift

Posted by Unknown on from the everyone's-got-one dept.

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.

3 of 636 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Since when does Qt "work" with OS X? by Kesha · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is VLC
    There is CMake
    There is my project -- https://sourceforge.net/projec...
    There is Sorenson Squeeze -- http://www.sorensonmedia.com/s...
    I am sure there are others

  2. Windows Phone and RT do not require C# by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    I was under impression that all new windows "apps" had to be written in C# against a new SDK that has neither binary nor source compatibility with Win32/posix/C/C++. I'd be glad to be wrong, but that's what I've seen so far.

    Only Windows Phone 7 and Xbox Live Indie Games required C#.* C++ works on Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT, though they do require use of the Windows Runtime API. For actual Windows on x86, you can continue developing desktop applications without having to deal with Windows Runtime (the "Metro" crap).

    * In theory, they required verifiably type-safe CIL compatible with the .NET Compact Framework. In practice, they required C#, as standard C++ is not verifiably type-safe, and DLR languages require functionality not in .NET CF.

  3. Compatibility is no problem, before or after swift by perpenso · · Score: 5, Informative

    Good bye source compatibility. We hardly knew ye.

    I have absolutely no compatibility problems. I strictly use objective-c for only user interface code. The core functional application code is written in c/c++. I have multiple iOS/Android apps whose core code is shared and can even be compiled with a console app under Mac OS X or Linux, I use this for regression testing and fuzzing. A headless Linux box in the closet exercises this core code. Similar story for Mac OS X and Windows.

    Swift code can replace objective-c code and it matters little to me. Has zero impact on other platforms I target.

    Admittedly I've ported other people's code between Windows, Mac and Linux for years and written my own code for Windows, Mac and Linux for years and as a result I am extremely aggressive about separating UI code from functional code.

    For those people using some sort of cross-platform wrapper for their project, if it supports Mac OS X objective-c it will probably support Swift. Even if it takes time for the wrapper developers so what, the use of Swift is entirely optional.