AppleInsider Staff
Apple's nascent Swift programming language could have a bright future ahead with one of the company's chief competitors, as Google is reportedly considering bring Swift to Android as a "first-class" language.
Google discussed the idea of bringing Swift into Android with at least two major third-party developers — Facebook and Uber — according to The Next Web. Those talks are said to have taken place late last year in London, though they remain preliminary.
The search giant is thought to be feeling out potential long-term replacements for Java, over which it is embroiled in a long-running legal spat with Oracle.
Any official Android implementation of Swift would not replace Java immediately, though. Nearly every user-facing piece of the operating system would need to be rewritten from the ground up, as well as a huge portion of Android's core.
Such a move could prove attractive for developers, who would be able to more easily create native cross-platform apps.
Also under consideration for Google is Kotlin, a language designed by Java-focused development company JetBrains and designed to be interoperable with Java. Google is said to have concerns about Kotlin's speed, however, preferring Swift's "upside" over both Kotlin and Java.
Malcolm Owen
Amber Neely
Christine McKee
Chip Loder
Marko Zivkovic
36 Comments
Embrace, Extend, and... Fork. (Like they did with WebKit)
Apple made it open source for wide adoption but must keep control so it doesn't become like fragmented android. For Google, this is much better way out from under Java. Universities curriculum and enterprise IT development will embrace it in big way. IBM is an example. .
This could be a huge, massive feather in the cap for Swift. If Google adopts the energy behind Swift will just continue to grow, I can see Swift lasting for decades replacing many of today older languages. No programming language is perfect but Swift is good enough to attract a lot of interest from many domains as it firms up.
Win, win for all but Oracle (claimed Java owner). While it would be nice to think that Apple would have "control" over Swift, it is now open source and available for modifications. Ideally the "glue" that will keep Swift mods from fragmenting is the interoperability, but with time all companies want their products differentiated so there will be some mods that will break this.