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The Swift Programming Language

developer.apple.com

631–640 of 970 posts

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#631

Ok, what about runtime support for older devices/iOS versions? They didn't say anything about it.

It'll be available for all devices supported by iOS 8, so going back to iPhone 4S. The runtime of Swift is also the runtime of Objective-C, but the runtime might need some upgrades to fully support the Swift semantics in a safe manner. EDIT: Correction. It's available also on iOS 7. Just confirmed by Apple. Great :)

Do you have a link for the confirmation?

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#632
Anyone know how Swift might achieve its claimed speedup vs. Objective-C? I can't see how it could get the advertised numbers without method inlining, which appears to be incompatible with the dynamic object model that it inherits from Objective-C

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#633

You appear to be advocating a new: [ ] functional [X] imperative [X] object-oriented [X] procedural [X] stack-based [ ] "multi-paradigm" [ ] lazy [ ] eager [X] statically-typed [ ] dynamically-typed [ ] pure [X] impure [ ] non-hygienic [ ] visual [ ] beginner-friendly [ ] non-programmer-friendly [ ] completely incomprehensible programming language. Your language will not work. Here is why it will not work. You appear…

In addition to being a space-hogging recapitulation of an old, boring Usenet joke, a lot of your checks are wrong; some of them are because the Usenet joke is lame, but some of them are just you missing things, like the fact that Swift interacts directly with C/ObjC, uses the same IDE as Cocoa developers already use, &c. This lame Usenet joke was a way of punching down at people joining language newsgroups trying to…

You make some good points but this post is coming across as really snarky. Might be worth lightening the tone some.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#634
post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, can't seem to change page in Chrome. In Firefox, it works slightly better but still doesn't really. I'm guessing it only works on Safari? How can they release a language and not have proper documentation that is accessible by anyone? It'd be great if someone could get the book, convert it to PDF and post it online.

PDF - https://www.dropbox.com/s/wkxqv1zcgrg28m4/The%20Swift%20Prog...

“Apple Inc. Copyright © 2014 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Apple Inc., with the following exceptions: Any person is hereby authorized to store documentation on a single computer or device for personal use only and to print copies of documentation for personal use provided that the documentation contains Apple’s copyright notice.”

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#637
We're writing a story for The Next Web on Swift. If anyone's interested in being interviewed for an article, can you flick me an email on owen@thenextweb.com with brief answers to some or all of the following questions. I'd love to talk to anyone who's used Objective-C before and share your opinions/experience:

1) How does Apple releasing Swift make you feel as an Objective-C developer?

2) Are you excited to code using Swift?

3) What about Swift makes you most excited?

4) Do you worry about upskilling to Swift?

5) How do you think Swift will change the way you work?

6) What concerns do you have about swift?

Keen to understand how this impacts people and share that if you have time to talk to me :)

If you don't want to email, just reply here.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#638
post #60

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).

Swift looks a lot like a scripting/dynamic programming language. For e.g. this is a complete Swift program: println("Hello") I think the idea was that Swift will be as easy to code as Python and faster than Objective-C.

Dynamic has nothing to do with it. printfn "Hello" is a complete program in F#, too.

There's no reason C#, Java, etc. can't have such things exposed, but they get so wrapped up in their boilerplate and OO overhead they choose not to.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#639
post #37

I'm not even an iOS developer but this is by far the most exciting thing I heard in the keynote. As an amatuer/hobbyist programmer who's self-taught with Ruby, JavaScript, etc., the one thing that was keeping me from experimenting with iOS apps was Objective-C. I know I could tackle it, but it's been hard to take the plunge. I don't know much about Swift yet, but from what I've seen it looks very exciting. So if Appl…

I spent a lot of time trying to do stuff with ObjectiveC, but just hated the syntax. That's been the biggest thing keeping me from developing Mac OSX apps; I just prefer Ruby's simplicity. I'm going to seriously give Swift a try.

Ruby is simple and beautiful, isn't it? Too bad it never got the shower of money from big backers Javascript, PHP and now Swift got blessed with.

Re: The Swift Programming Language

#640

Swift has also pattern matching which I think is really awesome.

Yes. They even have ranges in the patterns inside tuples. Not sure if any other language has that particular syntax.

F# has that. And also allows you to define your own constructors to pattern match on anything you want.
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