Coming from higher level languages, slowly moving "closer to the metal", I find Swift just a bit short of gorgeous. I find it strikes a good balance of modern features and backwards-compatibility and flexibility. In my eyes it's a nice mix of Python, Ruby and Haskell (and a bit of C++).
I speculate that, down the road, ObjC will become deprecated for use in high level frameworks such as Cocoa, but aren't so worried about C/C++ being deprecated. Time however will show.
It's actually refreshing to see high-performance (as claimed) languages of such high level used for app development, maybe dropping down to C/C++ for implementation of specific parts.
I only hope that Apple will release the language/runtime so that people from all platforms are able to use it (haven't seen any mention of this). I guess it can happen, as Cocoa, NSObject etc are not part of the language.
Akis
Well nobody can say for sure. Well the people here who could say for sure aren't going to say, that's for sure.
But I can't see that happening in forever, it's certainly not something I'm worrying about. The kernel is written in C, IOKit is written in C++, CoreFoundation, all bazillion lines of it, is in C, Cocoa and Cocoa touch, all two bazillion lines of them, are in C or Objective-C. AudioKit is all C and so performance oriented it needs to be. So they are going to have to continue supporting those languages for basically ever.
I assume support for Fortran went away somewhere before they gave up on GCC and went to CLANG, actually Fortran support pre-dates my coding for Mac. That's not a problem with C and C++, CLANG supports them and it's not suddenly going to stop supporting them overnight, or really ever.
Perhaps the pace of change in Objective-C will slow down, that might happen. Wouldn't mind that myself, ObjC is quite full featured enough for me at this point. I was hoping for generics, but even that I didn't really care that much. I suspect the templates will start giving you a Swift template instead of an ObjC one.
I'm chewing through the Swift book trying to keep an open mind. My first though was "what, another language" and my second thought was "what, another language" and my third thought was I should get to the end of the book before deciding some of the syntax is decidedly odd. If you haven't looked, look, I haven't quite discerned the pattern in the language yet but I'm only on page 65. There's a few PERL'y bits in there, as in you can write it like this, or that, or shorter, or you can replace all the variables with ! _ $ # & and ^, put it in curly braces outside the function call and it will still work somehow. Sorry .. open mind, open mind.
I'm sort of hoping that Swift works out to be great for writing what you would write in ObjC for 90% of what you do, more concisely:without:longMethods:surroundedBy:massesOfSquareBrackets:untilYourEyesBleed:, but I can't see ObjC going away, nor the lovely language which is C underpinning it.
So that begs another question. Why? Why did Apple do this? Why did they write their own language with a rather eclectic syntax? I didn't feel ObjC lacked much, bit wordy, perhaps Swift will be less-so, not sure yet. I always felt people who couldn't grasp ObjC probably weren't going to write killer apps anyway and those who did grasp it were able to do most anything they needed. Understanding the libraries, NIBs, the responder chain (sigh) and all that other stuff was always much harder than the language. On 3 Jun, 2014, at 8:45 pm, McLaughlin, Michael P. < email@hidden> wrote:
At yesterday’s WWDC, a speaker introduced the Swift language by saying. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get rid of the C?”
Instant panic!!
Does anyone know, for real, if Apple intends to stop supporting C and C++? That’s what it sounded like. They already do not support Fortran even though there is a *lot* of Fortran code out there, even fairly new code like MultiNest.
Please say it isn’t so. Not all of us consider “power users” to be just those who create feature-length cartoons. Many are scientists and engineers.
Thanks.
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