AppleInsider Staff
Calling it "fast, modern, safe and interactive," Apple on Monday unveiled Swift, a brand new Xcode programming language that it says is superior to Objective-C.
In a demonstration, Apple showed off the "Swift Playground," where developers write code and how results are displayed as soon as code is written. Apple says Swift was designed from the ground up for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.
Swift can be used for basic apps, like social networking, or advanced 3D games using the new "Metal" graphics optimization. And because it operates alongside Objective-C, developers will be able to seamlessly interchange languages.
Included in Swift are Generics, which allow developers to get more done with very little code written. In one example, an entire list of images was loaded with one simple line of code.
Swift Playgrounds also allow developers to see the entire history of a value over time as an application runs. Swift also includes full control of time, so a developer can fast forward or backward to see how their app might react in certain situations.
When it ships, Swift will have complete Xcode support, and a language guide is already available to developers on the iBookstore. Developers will also be able to submit apps written in Swift to the App Store when iOS 8 launches later this year.
Amber Neely
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214 Comments
I wish I knew how to program (as I have great ideas on games/apps but not a lick on how to program), but this seems more like an attempt to make their games a bit more exclusive to their platform.
Amazing. No one expected this.
Yup - this was definitely underwhelming. No new 6" iPhone.
/s
I was turned onto a video by GatorGuy a few years (years?) ago. Can’t find the link. Maybe he can. I have the video downloaded, but uploading it again would be unnecessary.
EDIT: FOUND IT.
This guy’s giving a talk about software development and the power that could be afforded to developers if the coding software gave them realtime feedback. It blew me away, because that’s exactly what is needed! Being able to see where elements on the screen are going, changing them on the fly, building the world based on the realtime feedback, scrubbing through the execution, etc.
And Swift+Xcode is much exactly that.
I am absolutely thrilled by this. Can’t wait to see it in action.
This is what Apple has over Windows and Android. The mentally inadequate scream that features are being “copied” (ignoring that they’re not), while refusing to acknowledge that they don’t even have anything remotely like what Apple has on the back end.
From the icon, I expected the language to be called Peregrine. Swift works, too.
I wish I knew how to program (as I have great ideas on games/apps but not a lick on how to program), but this seems more like an attempt to make their games a bit more exclusive to their platform.
Swift isn't a gaming API it's general purpose. If a developer wants to keep things portable they'll simply write as much OpenGL code as they can.