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The Swift Programming Language

developer.apple.com

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Re: The Swift Programming Language

#141

Post by sumeno »

pimlottc wrote: post #121
sumeno wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's precisely his point. There was already a pre-existing (but little-known) language called Go when Google announced theirs.

Gotcha, my mistake. I thought the point was Apple was making their own language like Google did with Go and he was just linking the wrong language.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#142

Post by valarauca1 »

mathieuh wrote: post #63

> Looking for the Swift parallel scripting language? Please visit http://swift-lang.org Did they not know or do they just not care?

I think they just don't care. Swift-lang looks to be completely different when you look at the examples[1]. Its syntax is more java-y then Apple's iteration.

Also Swift-lang is Apache 2.0 licensed, which I have a feeling Apple wouldn't use as a base for a new language.

[1] https://trac.ci.uchicago.edu/swift/browser/branches/release-...

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#144

Post by stcredzero »

freehunter wrote: post #111
stcredzero wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the inclusion of Python, seems so random to me It's supposed to be a "mainstream" scripting language. Also, it's an easy way for them to get favorable numbers for their presentation.

On the Ars liveblog, I didn't see any mention of Swift support for other platforms. Are we going to see Swift on Linux and Windows as well?

Swift on the Server with some modern CSP flavored concurrency mechanisms would Rock! Then combine that with a Swift-like language that compiles to Javascript, and that language could take over the web.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#145

Post by creativeembassy »

kunstmord wrote: post #91
apl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Apple pushed the speed of Javascript in the newest version of Safari, earlier in the keynote. They probably try not to complete with themselves.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#146

Post by kcorbitt »

So it looks like the language isn't open source and won't target non-Apple runtimes?

I'm not trying to troll, I just think that it's a pity that Apple tends to limit the ecosystem and applications of its otherwise-great languages. Building against LLVM ought to make it fairly trivial to make this cross-platform.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#147

Post by mkremins »

clebio wrote: post #52

"...we wondered what we could do without the baggage of C." Is that tongue in cheek? It's not even a particularly large, encumbered language, C.

I suspect they were referring more to the syntactic baggage in Objective-C – which is at least partially a result of the fact that ObjC was originally implemented as a simple C preprocessor. To avoid syntactic conflicts with C, ObjC uses lots of weird syntactic constructs that contribute to the language's characterization as ugly.

A good example is the liberal use of the @ character to denote ObjC literals – even in front of strings and numbers, because raw C strings/numbers have different semantics and won't play well with the standard ObjC APIs.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#148

Post by slantedview »

varenc wrote: post #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.

Seems fine for a book intended to teach OSX/iOS dev.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#150

Post by lexy0202 »

arasmussen wrote: post #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";

Do you need the semicolons?
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