Swift is a type-safe language that compiles to native code using LLVM.I am new to Swift as are most people outside Apple, but took a quick look at the book, The Swift Programming Language, along with the announcement details. Now Apple has come up with its own equivalent. Visual Basic is almost as old as Windows itself, and C# was introduced in 2000. This has been a differentiator for Windows. Overall, it is fair to say that coding for OS X and iOS has a higher bar than for Windows because Apple has not provided anything like Microsoft’s C# or Visual Basic, type-safe languages with easy form builders that let you snap together an application in a short time, while still being powerful enough for almost any purpose. I should mention that RAD (Rapid Application Development) on OS X has long been possible using the wholly-owned Filemaker, a database manager with a powerful scripting language, but this is not suitable for general-purpose apps. Companies such as Xamarin and Embarcadero (with Delphi) have had some success, and of course Adobe PhoneGap (or the open source Cordova) has had significant take-up for cross-platform code based on HTML and JavaScript.
Apple’s focus on Objective-C has left a gap for easier to use alternatives, though the main reason developers use something other than Objective-C, as far as I am aware, is for cross-platform projects. Nevertheless it is an intimidating language if you come from a background of, say, JavaScript or Microsoft. I have only dabbled in Objective-C but when I last tried it I was pleasantly surprised: memory management was no hassle and I found it productive. So far it looks like the other Swift has not returned the favour).įor as long as I can remember, serious Apple developers have had to use Objective-C, an object-oriented C that is not like C++. (There was already a language called Swift, used for parallel scripting, but Apple links to the other Swift in case you land on the wrong page. Apple has announced a new programming language, called Swift.
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