An Overview of Apple’s Swift Programming Language


The jaws of iOS developers everywhere dropped with the announcement at WWDC yesterday that Apple was introducing a new programming language to eventually replace Objective-C, called Swift. The surprise wasn’t that they did it (everyone knew it had to be done), but that it happened so soon. Apple has so much institutional knowledge of Objective-C that to replace it is truly a massive sea change. The problem with Objective-C, being a 25-year old mashup of C and Smalltalk, is that is was never quite fully-baked. And it was not suited for high-performance code, causing developers to revert to C or C++ in many cases. Here are my initial thoughts and observations on how Swift compares to Objective-C and other modern languages. There’s a LOT to cover, so I just picked out the interesting bits:
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