“Over two weeks ago, Apple at WWDC announced something entirely unexpected: thousands of new APIs and a brand-new programming language, Swift,” Rainer Brockerhoff blogs. “Reactions varied all over the spectrum. Non-developers (especially ‘industry analysts’) mostly had no idea what it meant: they said Apple had announced ‘nothing.’ Almost all developers, however, were ecstatic — ‘the most significant event Apple ever staged.’ Regarding Swift, this initial enthusiasm diverged as soon as people read the (relatively sparse) documentation and actually began to play around with the language — a very early beta version was available for download soon after the announcement. Hilarity, chaos and pandemonium ensued; tension, apprehension and dissension had begun.”
“It really appears to be a very pragmatic language. If you look at the generated library header (in Xcode, command-doubleclick on any Swift type to see it), nearly all operators and types are defined there, in often surprising detail,” Brockerhoff writes. “In other words, few language features are hard-wired into the parser/compiler – the Swift library/runtime and the pre-LLVM optimizer are, instead, responsible for the language and its implementation details, and therefore more easily twiddled if necessary.”
Much more in the full article here.
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