Swift Vs. Objective-C: Why the Future Favors Swift

snydeq writes: InfoWorld's Paul Solt argues that It's high time to make the switch to the more approachable, full-featured Swift for iOS and OS X app dev. He writes in Infoworld: "Programming languages don't die easily, but development shops that cling to fading paradigms do. If you're developing apps for mobile devices and you haven't investigated Swift, take note: Swift will not only supplant Objective-C when it comes to developing apps for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and devices to come, but it will also replace C for embedded programming on Apple platforms. Thanks to several key features, Swift has the potential to become the de-facto programming language for creating immersive, responsive, consumer-facing applications for years to come."

Comments

Re:Unlikely

[Trepidity]

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.