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The Swift Programming Language

developer.apple.com

91–100 of 970 posts

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#91
post #32

Oh God, they just compared the speed of Objective C, Swift and... Python! It's nice to see Swift being faster than Objective C, etc., but what has Python got to do with coding native iOS/OS X apps? Of course it's going to fail at speed when compared to a static compiled language. What a weird and pointless comparison, imo (I mean the inclusion of Python, seems so random to me).

It's neither weird nor pointless. They're going for something that is as comfortable to work with as modern dynamic languages, for something that eschews the cruft of ObjC. Python is simply a very popular representative for this type of language. Of course, it's an easy target. But I can see why they went for it.

Yeah, I kind of get it after some additional thought (and reading through the replies). Maybe I missed out on some detail (not watching the live video, just a text stream) – now that I've taken a look at the syntax, the comparison seems more valid. Still, comparing this to Javascript would've been more interesting (webapps, all that stuff).

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#93
It seems like the only way to view the programming language documentation is on iBooks on an iOS device? For a programming book, this is ridiculous.

Edit: The latest version of OS X does support iBooks. Lets hope you have that.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#94

Oh God, they just compared the speed of Objective C, Swift and... Python! It's nice to see Swift being faster than Objective C, etc., but what has Python got to do with coding native iOS/OS X apps? Of course it's going to fail at speed when compared to a static compiled language. What a weird and pointless comparison, imo (I mean the inclusion of Python, seems so random to me).

Perhaps because the syntax of Swift is so simple that it almost looks (and hopefully feels) like a scripting language? (type inference, no semicolons, automatically managed memory)

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#95
Feels like they looked at a bunch of programming languages, took all their favorite features, and then put them into one which still sits on top of the ObjC runtime. And then added some Apple syntactic craziness.

For example:

var apples = 3; // mutable

let oranges = 5; // immutable

let summary = "I have \(apples) apples and \(oranges) oranges";

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#99
post #61

Looks like they pulled a Golang: http://swift-lang.org

You do realise that link is completely unrelated to what Apple is doing, right?

EDIT: Nevermind, my mistake. I thought the comment was about Apple was making their own language like Google did with Go, not Go! already existing as a language

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#100
This is a fascinating development. I wonder how Swift will impact the many cross-platform mobile frameworks. Objective-C was a big barrier for many beginners and small companies and a free and easier development language provided by Apple and supported with good docs and third-party tutorials will likely command a good amount of mind-share. It's going to be an interesting few months in the mobile development world.
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