“Apple’s decision to make Swift open source has the potential to intensify development of powerful new HomeKit solutions,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld.
“If you want a powerful, open-source, platform-compatible development solution capable of running applications both on the device and in the cloud, Swift will become a compelling choice,” Evans writes. “Particularly since IBM is already deep into Swift, using it in conjunction with its own enterprise and – perhaps even more significant — big data developments.”
“I anticipate we’ll see swarms of cloud/device Swift-based hybrid IoT devices from all kinds of makers appear in future,” Evans writes. “These won’t be confined to consumer devices, but will span the entire connected ecosystem, given Apple’s growing status in enterprise IT.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: There is some much potential to improve efficiency and connectivity that it’s virtually limitless!
This is when Swift meets the tarmac and we get to see its performance out in the world of dedicated hackers. Have at it! Prove it to be the best coding language going.
This is how I’m using C# today.
Its a smart move. I’m looking forward to trying out Swift across multiple platforms.
I’m not a programmer or anything of that sort. But for those who are, just how transformative of a language is Swift?
My personal opinion is that Swift being transformative really comes down to where Swift goes from here.
It’s Apple’s take on a modern language and feature wise its on par with modern Java and C# languages in terms of ease of syntax and features. You’ve got all the modern stack layers of type safety, bounds checking and garbage collection. It also supports the modern Object Oriented features such as generics. That stuff isn’t that interesting and its been done.
The potential I see in Swift is that while Swift offers all the amneties of a java runtime and or the .net framework, the swift compiler to my knowledge produces native code binaries, not bytecode or an intermediate language such as MSIL on .net. For me that is interesting.
I’d like to see the language develop and I’d like to see it strong beyond just Apple platforms.
Microsoft released the core of C# as an EMCA standard years ago and last year released the core of the entire .net framework as open source and there are some really powerful tools that have been built as a result of these moves and efforts outside of Microsoft.
I can write c# code right now and easily target a multitude of targets from the iPhone to a Linux server and the core language is robust.
Swift needs to develop to that point in my opinion and I think it will.
It was an awesome gift to programmers and to me a sign that Apple is taking their position as the leader in technology seriously.