Swift

LMAX Exchange

Apple have released Swift, their new programming language – designed to be familiar to Objective-C programmers and work well with the existing Cocoa frameworks. It’s far too soon to make substantial judgements about the language – that can only come after actually using it in real projects for some time. However, there’s nothing that stands out as incredibly broken, so with Apple’s backing it’s extremely unlikely that it won’t become a very commonly used language. After all, there’s plenty wrong with every other programming language and we manage to make do with them.

What I find most promising about it though is that many language design choices are justified by them preventing common causes of bugs in Objective-C or C (and many other languages).  For example:

“The cases of a switch statement do not “fall through” to the next case in Swift, avoiding common C errors caused by missing break statements.”

Excerpt From: Apple Inc. “The Swift Programming Language.” iBooks

They’ve replaced many common checkstyle/lint errors with better language design that the mistakes impossible (what a good idea). It could be argued that they could have taken more extreme approaches to find solutions or prevented more sources of errors with additional cleverness but my initial take is that it has likely found a good balance between fixing common causes of bugs while still being familiar to Objective-C coders (it’s target audience) and working well with the existing frameworks and libraries.

We’ll likely find plenty to complain about, as always, but overall I suspect it will be a very nice language to work with.

Adrian Sutton LMAX Exchange Staff Blogs   LMAX Exchange  

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