Haven't had a chance to look at the docs for it yet, but will LLVM be the compiler for it and will it support compiling Swift into its native bytecode?
Yes. It's on the front page: https://developer.apple.com/swift/
The Swift Programming Language
291–300 of 970 posts
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#292I'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…
Agreed. I would go so far as to say that this was "one more thing" worthy. It's definitely more exciting than something like an incremental update to the Apple TV.
My dad tuned out as the keynote got to this point, but for me (as a web developer... for now!) this was the highlight.
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#293So 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.
[deleted]
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#294“You also don’t need to write semicolons at the end of every statement.” Please. Please. PLEASE don't be whitespace delimited!
Please. Please. PLEASE don't be whitespace delimited! One of the prime examples I give for how HN/reddit has gone downhill was being downvoted by some clueless hipsters for suggesting that it would be easy to cross-compile from a whitespace-delimited language to a non-whitespace-delimited one. It's not some kind of huge fundamental divide in languages. For any non-whitespace delimited context free language, it should…
Practically speaking I'd prefer to work with a language and toolchain that doesn't require me to do that kind of stuff (write my own cross compiler from a derivative of the language that has all my own preferences for syntax). I'd constantly worry about maintaining that piece and having that cut into my quality & productivity. I think applied language theory as it pertains to productivity is fair game for a good discussion.
That said, whoever downvoted you for that reaffirms my belief that HN should have limited metamoderation with some kind of exponential backoff of mod privileges for egregiously poor moderation.
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#295Swift has a built in option type “if let actualNumber = possibleNumber.toInt() { println("\(possibleNumber) value: \ (actualNumber)") } else { println("\(possibleNumber) could not be converted to an integer") }” Nice to see the Apple's language developers embracing functional programming by providing a clean implementation of the Maybe Monad as well as support for closures.
I love this feature, but it's not quite the Maybe Monad, which lets you assemble a sequence of (possibly failing) statements together, and fail the whole sequence if any of the parts fails (without if-statements or switching of any kind).
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#296Guys, I'm not sure if anybody's noticed yet, but call it a co-incident or what(make the "what" "copy"), but, another programming language with near similar features already exists, though its not C based and some other stuff is quite different but, yeah, see this : http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/725...
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
Yes, it's funny that people didn't pick up on Apple potentially doing more with it when his demo made the rounds a few years back.
Why would they "pick up on" it? That was almost two years after Bret left Apple and it's been another two years since. At this point these ideas are as available to anyone as they are to Apple.
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#298So 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.
[deleted]
That's a different Swift.
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#299We changed the url for this story from http://thenextweb.com/apple/2014/06/02/apple-announces-swift.... If we pick the wrong url, happy to change it again, so let us know. The goal is to have one discussion about each significant announcement, and have the best url for each.
Re: The Swift Programming Language
#300Why is this platform not JavaScript based (so we can leverage the largest ecosystem in the world) or Python based or anything-else-that-exists based?
In other news, has Android killed iOS yet so we can stop worrying about Apple? Can't happen soon enough.