Except for the Unicode variable names (which is nice, but not extremely important), all the features heralded in this article exist in C# for years. Needless to say, when writing Windows Phone apps, you can use C#...
Thank goodness. I hate languages where you can't use semicolons, it leads to strange errors sometimes and reduces readability in my opinion though even allowing no semi-colons is a bad thing in my opinion. For example a really long SQL query where you might be concatenating multiple strings can get messy if you don't break it into multiple lines, but then because its a new line the language may misinterpret the code. I'm not a huge fan of non-semi colon languages for this reason. C# is the best designed language I have used and I've used a LOT of languages (last I had counted I was close to 25). With that said this sounds like a nice improvement over objective c. My biggest beef with programming on Macs though is the way the HOME, END, Page Up, Page Down, shift and control work. I use those keys in various combinations to copy and paste lines of code very rapidly without thinking about it. When I get on a mac it slows me way down and there appears to be no way to do many very powerful keyboard based selection commands that I take for granted on Windows. It slowed me down so much that I actually gave up writing an app I was making a while back and sold the mac mini I was coding it on. When you get used to programming at a certain speed it makes it tough to take that change. I wish you could develop iphone apps on windows and still use apple's tools, but I understand why they don't support that.
I hope you're not proposing that Apple users / developers solve the problem of imperfect development tools by switching to Windows. Cause that would be control freakish (freakery?), right. :)
True except for the single MOST important point --- Swift interoperates with the Objective C runtime and Objective C semantics, and C# does not...
Look, Swift is not MEANT to change the world of programming as we know it. It is APPLE's solution to APPLE DEVELOPERs' problems. Complaining that it doesn't solve your problems, or that something else would be nicer (even though it doesn't actually solve Apple's problems), or that is has no new concepts ALL kinda miss the point.
C# is not slow at all, its insanely fast, and due to the abundant and high quality libraries included, you can actually develop much more complex solutions easily, and refactor them to much bigger picture optimizations where needed.
This is completely incorrect. C# uses byte code (MSIL) but it is not interpreted; it has a very performant JIT compiler. The runtime safety (like bounds checking arrays and garbage collection) is a very small CPU overhead, although a bit more in memory. Given proper technique, C# applications can run 95+% the speed of C++. Similarly, you can also use pointers and disable bounds checking for the routines that need to be even more optimized.
Also, Microsoft recently released a new compiler that allows the code to be compiled to native code instead of MSIL.
Finally, one of the most popular gaming frameworks on iOS is Unity, and one of the most popular cross platform mobile development frameworks is Xamarin, and both solutions create incredibly fast iOS games and applications.
Don't forget, that when developing WindowsPhone apps in C# you don't need to worry about pesky issues like monetization or marketshare either!
Unlike Apple, that like a true control freak, insists on dragging their developers through the problems of dealing with a huge market of potentially paying customers, Microsoft has made a truly developer friendly platform, with an potential market so small that monetization is Impossible.
That leaves developers free to spend all their time doing what they do best: Developing!
Excuse me, but the solution to multiple duplicate goto statements appearing consecutively is.... a new programming language? Smoke what? Good grief these guys...
How do you figure that's a straw man? He is referencing the specific cause of the SSL failure being consecutive goto statements without braketing. Without the brakets defining the scope of the if statement the second statement is no longer affected by the if, and is thus executed no mater what.
Apple's solution to this seems to be to explicitly force braket use in thier new programming language.
The language has been in design for almost 4 years. While brackets were perhaps optional until the SSL bug was discovered, the idea that the SSL bug was “solved” by inventing a new language is absurd.
(Further, nobody seems to expect that Swift, which was designed as described above, to be a nice wrapper around Apple libraries and common OSX/iOS practices, will be used for OSS.)
One would hope that with Microsoft's massive R&D budget over the years, they'd have the best development tools. I understand you were trying to be funny, but Swift aims to fix a lot of Objective C's shortcomings. Should they have adopted an established language? Perhaps, but I think the idea of being able to mix Swift and Objective-C was a big deal to Apple to help ease the transition, not to mention Swift's similarity to Objective-C. Just offering a new language with more modern structures wouldn't guarantee adoption by developers.
Hmmm, yes it turns out that they do. Visual Studio is arguably the most solid development environment out there and F# is years ahead of where the likes of Swift can hope to be in 5 years. Likewise for C# over Java. You have to go for a language in the ML family to get anything better than F# and incidentally MSR has been supporting researchers on the development of Haskell for quite a number of years.
Also, miTLS is a verified implementation of the TLS protocol implemented in F# through F7 (foundation behind the F* programming language).
As opposed to Swift, F# is free and open source as well as target Windows/Linux/iOS/OS X/Android/JavaScript(see WebSharper).
Google and Apple's offering in term of Software Development stack doesn't even touch Microsoft's/Xamarin.
"Visual Studio is arguably the most solid development environment out there"
Having worked with both Xcode and Visual Studio, I have to say that there is definitely room for improvement for both of them. I've never have been as frustrated with an IDE as I have been with VS. Just the simple things, like using a dark theme for the text editor were a massive pain (yes, I know this has been addressed in recent releases -- but this has been a standard feature everywhere else for *decades* now). And the crashes I've had under Xcode rival only iTunes for most epic, IMO. At least restarting Xcode after a crash is super fast...
I think that most people that claim that VS is the most solid development environment out there haven't been looking at the alternatives that are around lately. The other IDEs have gained a ton of functionality over the past 10 or so years. Xcode has just as good code completion (IMO) as VS, which was always one of the hallmarks there. And clang/llvm have in a very short time become some of the best compilers/optimizers available -- free or not.
Unfortunately, though, it really doesn't matter -- Windows developers have to use VS, Mac/iOS developers have to use Xcode and Android developers (mostly) have to use Android Studio. It doesn't matter if Xcode is better or if VS is better or whatever -- you can't (easily) develop for Windows with Xcode or for iOS with VS, so it ultimately doesn't matter. The default IDE for a platform is going to be the primary way to develop apps for that platform.
I think it's fair to say that Swift was invented to make developing for Apple <i>more approachable</i>, as it lacks the strange-looking Obj-C message-passing orientation, and <i>more productive</i>, as the language design is less tedious and the playground instant-feedback will be very helpful.
These are both good objectives, and no doubt they'll be achieved. But there's no reason to think that Apple had OTHER goals, such as using Swift for non-Apple situations, and its high specificity to Mac/iOS situations is a reminder that generic languages, and languages designed for Microsoft environments, <b>by definition</b> would be less useful.
PROTIP: Don't comment on stuff you don't have a whiff of a clue about. It only makes you look very stupid.
Reading this article and summing it up as: "Apple comes up with dumb solution to gotofail issue" is kinda like reading a book about the Apollo program, and summing it up as: "Guy plants flag in new and unusual place!"
I'm not sure about the enforced brackets. Sure it solves a problem, but it might make the code less readable and thus decreasing quality. Compare to variable name "m_pifoo" , for member variable foo which is a pointer to an integer. Sure you know what the member is and you immediately see if you accidentially add it to a short, but overall it's a bad idea. Everything else looks good (";" should have died years ago)
It works very well for Matlab: you don't need to put a semicolon at the end. If you don't the result of the statment is simply output to the command line. If you want a statement to stretch multiple lines you have to explicitly tell so by adding "..." at the end of the line. I really like it: no harm is done by forgetting a semicolon, yet no white-space dependence exists.
The cases where some languages allow omission of figure brackets for "if" statements are less readable as I always try to understand where the command actually ends.
The semicolon is useful for syntactical clarity. I do not see the argument against the semi colon as being valid. Is there really that much frustration with missing semi colons, and is it really worth it. Any programmer with any experience knows to put a semi colon at the end.
c3p is correct, semicolon is only a notion of familiarity, people familiar with any language in the ML family have dropped the semicolon and never looked back. That is, if you have an expression-based language as opposed to statements-based which is another solid flaw in Swift's design.
I disagree about semicolon. It makes certain complex multi-line expressions easier to read. And it's so easy and automatic. Kind of line typing a period at the end of a sentence. Or is that too hard for lazy programmers too?
I kinda lost the interest in reading this article after "they are calling Type Inference". Type inference is well known and widely spread among the programming languages. I agree with maxiniu, most of these features are on C#, and even, if you wanna code for iOS you could always use Xamarin's MonoTouch.
I smiled at "Apple has included a feature they are calling Type Inference" and I started laughing at "One of the most powerful features of Swift is something Apple is calling Generics".
As other people commented here, all those features are already present in current languages like C# since years ago. They are now revolutionary just because Apple is selling them? Come on!
When you say "One of the most powerful features of Swift is something Apple is calling Generics", it implies that Apple is introducing this new exclusive feature, even though generics are a common feature of many other programming languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_programming)... It is almost like saying "One of the most powerful features of Swift is something Apple is calling Functions"!
No, it it states it's a powerful new feature that didn't exist before, which it absolutely is. It's no different then saying "this <car type> features a powerful new engine <that's more powerful then the previous one but came on a different model before>."
Except Apple never said any of this. This is a poorly-written article. All Apple ever said was that they're including Generics in Swift. They never even used the word, "introduced."
Yeah.. I also hoped to find something intersting here. Sure it's better than that language which starts with "C" and ends with "obol".. but not much more.
Elimination of semi-colons, Type Inference, String commutation - aren't all these already present in Python. Generics? Oh come on...so many languages have that feature Atleast from the features mentioned in the article...I don't find anything new woth revolutionary Its just old wine in new bottle...fancy names and a brand called Apple
I think people are misunderstanding the point of this. Swift is only for people who program in ObjC, it's not intended to attract people who program in other languages because that would involve locking into Apple's platform. Your way of thinking puts Apple in a damned if they do, damned if they don't scenario. If ObjC stays the way it is it gets even more stagnant which hurts Apple developers and users. If Apple tries to remedy issues by creating something like Swift then people complain that they're all just features from other languages.
I think that no one have a problem with Apple launching a new language, the problem is how the article is written. With phrases like "One of the most powerful features of Swift is something Apple is calling Generics". Apple and EVERYONE is calling it Generics. Apple did not invented Generics, there were Generics before Swift. But writing the article in this way it may suggest to the reader that Apple invented all those features that were already present in many of other existing programming languages.
Yeah, Apple didn't invent any of this naming, and they didn't claim to. It was a known thing for years that Objective C was increasingly out of sync with modern programming conveniences (Ars Technica in particular was sounding that alarm early) and this fixes it in a pretty clean way. There was a rumor at WWDC that it'll be open sourced as part of the next LLVM major release too, which would be terrific.
BTW, this article misses one of the significant points about Swift: it can also be used as a batch/scripting language complete with the traditional #!/bin/swift or whatever header, and Xcode's Playground feature uses it in that mode to provide the sort of immediate-response environment that all of us who learned programming in the 1980s on BASIC for granted. Except on steroids: no 1980s BASIC would graph the value of a variable over time for you, or show the actual picture file that you just loaded.
Posts about new phones look at them in the context of other phones. This misses a lot of the context of the language, some of which goes back decades (type inference: ML, 1970s) and is gratefully acknowledged by Swift's lead creator (http://www.nondot.org/sabre/).
You're not into other languages and this is not a programming site, which is all fine, but I guess researching what others say or maybe running drafts by folks who *do* geek out on this stuff might help avoid accidentally taunting the commenting hordes.
No one claims that Apple invented any of these features. They have, however, put them together in their own way which may or may not be creative or useful - certainly not useful to those who eschew Apple programming.
This does not change the fact that it is a positive advancement for those who do program for iOS.
Additionally, the naysayers have forgotten 2 things: 1 - the interactive environment, and 2 - it runs literally 10x faster than Python
Python is anything but slow. In fact I've written scientific Python software that smoked C++ software even without converting selected functions to C and it took only a fraction of the time to write it.
The only problem Python has is the global interpreter lock which makes utilizing multiple CPU cores very annoying and tricky and may or may not be reason why Apple claims there's 10 fold improvement in select cases.
I'd rather they created a Python LLVM frontend than inventing yet another language. Iff they decide to opensource the compiler I might have another look otherwise Swift for me personally is a dead fish in the water...
I developed exclusively in C# for 7 years. What's new about Swift that this article didn't touch on:
Swift can be used as a system level language and, based on my own tests, it's faster than C and C++. Having a type safe, modern language that you could develop an OS in is a big deal in my opinion. Whether Apple opens the spec remains to be seen, but if they do, it will be a valuable contribution to the development community.
ROTFL at that goto example ... Usage of goto in high level languages is generally frowned upon nowadays (and has been for quite some time).
It's bad enough that Apple admits their programmers are inept lamers who are too thick to use other language constructs to work around goto statements, but what makes it even worse is to use this particular example to make that point and then try to spin it into something positive, while complaining about another statement termination method (the semi-colon) that this "new" language does away with.
This entire piece reeks horribly of Apple fanboism and really isn't something I ever expected to see on AT.
Your comment managed to check every negative stereotype about a passive aggressive fanboy on the internet(including the obsessive accusation that everyone else is).
Funny thing about that is that a lot of these programmers bounce around tech firms. If they're good enough for Apple, they probably either a) came from Microsoft and/or Google, or b) they'll be moving on to Microsoft and/or Google.
Also, let's be honest, it's a bit of a game, isn't it? I don't know if you develop for Apple or not, but I'm guessing you have a strong affiliation for one of the other tech giants, Msoft or Ggle. And you're reading and commenting on an article that's likely intended for Apple developers. What's the name of that game? What is it?
I am at a loss and disappointed in the comments that toy with 'apple fail' and C# nonsense. If you just want more anandtech reviews of power supplies use the filter. Fanboying your language so you can be first to throw a zinger misses the point of this language.
In the meantime, the language was built by the LLVM/CLANG guy, and should be taken seriously. Its claim to fame is the ability to program similar to scripting languages, but be compiled and type-safe for performance. Syntactic sugar is culled from several languages, including C#. This is stated as much.
I hope to see more detailed review of this language as its not often a major tech player starts one. We had Java from Sun, C# from MS, 'Go' from google, and now swift from Apple.
Should be taken seriously by who? If you're an iOS developer, then sure, you should take it seriously. Otherwise, there's no point in Swift as other languages are more mature, have a large ecosystem to draw from, and aren't locked down to a particular platform.
The whole point of Swift is to serve Apple's developers - no one else. Other languages simply don't play a role or can do as well as Swift since Swift is part of Apple's whole development system and other languages would need a lot of work, time and politics and committees just to get the changes Apple wants.
You're mistaking author credibility with good ideas. Instead of this pointless new language, the author could've written (or taken an existing) Python LLVM backend, extended it with Generics and whatever iOS-specific and OSX-specific APIs were needed, and called it a day. No need to reinvent the wheel.
As others have said, there is a lot more to swift. You're basing your comment on a singel article, and a pretty incomplete one at that.
Swift can be a lot faster on specific tasks than other languages, as well as the interactivity.
There's tons more technical details in the guide. I haven't finished it yet, but you should do your research before spouting nonsense about a language which you know little to nothing about. A single AT article isn't good enough.
What would be helpful is a pointer to an article that explains the motivation of Swift, and why it couldn't be done as an evolution of Objective C/C++ or as a command line option when invoking the compiler (as in something like "-objc-2014"). Asking everyone to download the handbook and read it to answer this question is not very helpful. I'm sure Apple had to document in writing what the justification for developing a new language was, so it shouldn't be hard for them to share what some of these points are to make it easy for others to write this type of article about Swift.
It isn't the language that's fast... It's the best-practices and the method of deployment (precompiled, JIT or interpreted).
I don't need to know about Swift to see its objectives. They're clearly stated -- basically a scripting language with some muscle behind it. Which is why a compiled form of the most common scripting language with iOS-specific extensions added would fit.
The top-level syntactical sugar doesn't affect (much of) what can be done with a language, so reinventing the wheel is a valid complaint no matter the motivation.
I'm not a big expert on it, but I don't think that's right. It's not a scripting language, it's a modification of Objective-C, a general purpose language. Someone wrote that you could mix in BASH scripting (I didn't know that). You can also write code that mixes Swift and Objective-C. But it's not just a scripting lg.
You might want to read the documentation. There is a lot more than just Generics that differ Swift from Python. It makes no sense to drag the baggage of Python.
Swift is totally irrelevant if you're not coding for OS X or iOS. Apple isn't trying to establish a new programming language here (Swift has basically nothing to offer you couldn't have easier and better supported with other languages), Apple is just trying to offer an alternative to Objective-C to code for OS X and iOS. If you do that, you have more options now. If you don't, nothing has changed.
C++ and other languages aren't really suited to an environment that grew out of NeXTStep, that in turn was developed with Objective-C. If you don't need to work with the Cocoa frameworks and everything else around that, you'd be an idiot to use Swift. But if you do, Swift looks like a more modern and less baroque alternative to Objective-C.
Actually, there was a rumor at WWDC that Swift will be included in the next LLVM major release, under the same UIUC/BSD license as the rest of LLVM and Clang. And Swift is entirely usable for non-NeXTStep scenarios, just as C# has found use far outside of Windows.
Yes, it may be "usable" elsewhere then, but still not much more than a novelty. There's no shortage of interesting programming languages and as far as these go Swift is even not very much interesting.
Another thing when it comes to Apple and programming languages: In addition to AppleScript you can now use JavaScript in OS X Yosemite to automate UI apps. This too is totally uninteresting in general terms. It's really big news though if you happen to have a need to automate Mac apps because you can finally stop fighting one of the worst programming languages ever invented (AppleScript is about the opposite of Perl: It's very easy to read and very, very hard to write).
Here is to hoping Visual Studio gets a C# compiler for iOS (and a playground emulator of course). I agree with most comments, both positive and negative but why let? const is so well established.
Because const is the opposite of established, it's actually widely ignored. It's better to have let because it's shorter than const but the same length as var.
And you are profoundly human in your attack towards the messenger and denial of reality. Const is widely known and rarely used. #define is used for constants at least an order of magnitude more often than const. In languages without preprocessor almost all uses of const are as substitutes for #define. The usage of const in imperative languages is laughably small compared to the usage of let in functional languages.
I think people are missing the point here. Swift is Apple's attempt to being a new, and modern Programming Languages that offers *interoperability* with Objective-C.
We're always looking to improve our future articles. Was there anything in particular that you didn't care for? Or were expecting (for a mid-length article) that wasn't in this article?
These seem like small generic aesthetic changes that don't require more than a couple lines of commentary. What are the real differences in this language?
Worth noting that the lead developer of Swift at Apple has publicly said many times that he tried to take the parts he thought were good from many other languages and blend them together. Rust, C#, Obj-C, Python, and more. That it is a pragmatic and modern language for Apple and their developers to use.
So of course it takes pieces of other languages. Of course it is good at some things and bad at some others. It isn't a revolutionary thing for the world, it's just evolutionary for one ecosystem. Taken in that context, Swift seems pretty decent to me. Some of the funky unfinished constructs and compiler bugs aside... apparently it is effectively in "beta" at this point.
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maxiniu - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Except for the Unicode variable names (which is nice, but not extremely important), all the features heralded in this article exist in C# for years. Needless to say, when writing Windows Phone apps, you can use C#...lmcd - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Well, and the syntax uses semicolons (which is a good thing, as it also improves readability)DERSS - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Semicolons, even though are not a requirement, are allowed on Swift, so if anyone wants to use them, it is possible.rkcth - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
Thank goodness. I hate languages where you can't use semicolons, it leads to strange errors sometimes and reduces readability in my opinion though even allowing no semi-colons is a bad thing in my opinion. For example a really long SQL query where you might be concatenating multiple strings can get messy if you don't break it into multiple lines, but then because its a new line the language may misinterpret the code. I'm not a huge fan of non-semi colon languages for this reason. C# is the best designed language I have used and I've used a LOT of languages (last I had counted I was close to 25). With that said this sounds like a nice improvement over objective c. My biggest beef with programming on Macs though is the way the HOME, END, Page Up, Page Down, shift and control work. I use those keys in various combinations to copy and paste lines of code very rapidly without thinking about it. When I get on a mac it slows me way down and there appears to be no way to do many very powerful keyboard based selection commands that I take for granted on Windows. It slowed me down so much that I actually gave up writing an app I was making a while back and sold the mac mini I was coding it on. When you get used to programming at a certain speed it makes it tough to take that change. I wish you could develop iphone apps on windows and still use apple's tools, but I understand why they don't support that.ex2bot - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
I hope you're not proposing that Apple users / developers solve the problem of imperfect development tools by switching to Windows. Cause that would be control freakish (freakery?), right. :)name99 - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
True except for the single MOST important point --- Swift interoperates with the Objective C runtime and Objective C semantics, and C# does not...Look, Swift is not MEANT to change the world of programming as we know it. It is APPLE's solution to APPLE DEVELOPERs' problems. Complaining that it doesn't solve your problems, or that something else would be nicer (even though it doesn't actually solve Apple's problems), or that is has no new concepts ALL kinda miss the point.
vFunct - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
Too bad C# is a slow-as-hell byte code interpreted language like Java, instead of an actual compiled language like C/C++/Objective-C.rkcth - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
C# is not slow at all, its insanely fast, and due to the abundant and high quality libraries included, you can actually develop much more complex solutions easily, and refactor them to much bigger picture optimizations where needed.winterspan - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
This is completely incorrect. C# uses byte code (MSIL) but it is not interpreted; it has a very performant JIT compiler.The runtime safety (like bounds checking arrays and garbage collection) is a very small CPU overhead, although a bit more in memory.
Given proper technique, C# applications can run 95+% the speed of C++. Similarly, you can also use pointers and disable bounds checking for the routines that need to be even more optimized.
Also, Microsoft recently released a new compiler that allows the code to be compiled to native code instead of MSIL.
Finally, one of the most popular gaming frameworks on iOS is Unity, and one of the most popular cross platform mobile development frameworks is Xamarin, and both solutions create incredibly fast iOS games and applications.
V900 - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
Don't forget, that when developing WindowsPhone apps in C# you don't need to worry about pesky issues like monetization or marketshare either!Unlike Apple, that like a true control freak, insists on dragging their developers through the problems of dealing with a huge market of potentially paying customers, Microsoft has made a truly developer friendly platform, with an potential market so small that monetization is Impossible.
That leaves developers free to spend all their time doing what they do best: Developing!
Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Apple fail;Apple fail;
Excuse me, but the solution to multiple duplicate goto statements appearing consecutively is.... a new programming language? Smoke what? Good grief these guys...
DanShockley - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Where did you find the straw to build that man? That must take talent!Akrovah - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
How do you figure that's a straw man? He is referencing the specific cause of the SSL failure being consecutive goto statements without braketing. Without the brakets defining the scope of the if statement the second statement is no longer affected by the if, and is thus executed no mater what.Apple's solution to this seems to be to explicitly force braket use in thier new programming language.
WaltFrench - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
The language has been in design for almost 4 years. While brackets were perhaps optional until the SSL bug was discovered, the idea that the SSL bug was “solved” by inventing a new language is absurd.(Further, nobody seems to expect that Swift, which was designed as described above, to be a nice wrapper around Apple libraries and common OSX/iOS practices, will be used for OSS.)
ex2bot - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
One would hope that with Microsoft's massive R&D budget over the years, they'd have the best development tools. I understand you were trying to be funny, but Swift aims to fix a lot of Objective C's shortcomings. Should they have adopted an established language? Perhaps, but I think the idea of being able to mix Swift and Objective-C was a big deal to Apple to help ease the transition, not to mention Swift's similarity to Objective-C. Just offering a new language with more modern structures wouldn't guarantee adoption by developers.xakor - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Hmmm, yes it turns out that they do. Visual Studio is arguably the most solid development environment out there and F# is years ahead of where the likes of Swift can hope to be in 5 years. Likewise for C# over Java. You have to go for a language in the ML family to get anything better than F# and incidentally MSR has been supporting researchers on the development of Haskell for quite a number of years.Also, miTLS is a verified implementation of the TLS protocol implemented in F# through F7 (foundation behind the F* programming language).
As opposed to Swift, F# is free and open source as well as target Windows/Linux/iOS/OS X/Android/JavaScript(see WebSharper).
Google and Apple's offering in term of Software Development stack doesn't even touch Microsoft's/Xamarin.
dmunsie - Friday, June 13, 2014 - link
"Visual Studio is arguably the most solid development environment out there"Having worked with both Xcode and Visual Studio, I have to say that there is definitely room for improvement for both of them. I've never have been as frustrated with an IDE as I have been with VS. Just the simple things, like using a dark theme for the text editor were a massive pain (yes, I know this has been addressed in recent releases -- but this has been a standard feature everywhere else for *decades* now). And the crashes I've had under Xcode rival only iTunes for most epic, IMO. At least restarting Xcode after a crash is super fast...
I think that most people that claim that VS is the most solid development environment out there haven't been looking at the alternatives that are around lately. The other IDEs have gained a ton of functionality over the past 10 or so years. Xcode has just as good code completion (IMO) as VS, which was always one of the hallmarks there. And clang/llvm have in a very short time become some of the best compilers/optimizers available -- free or not.
Unfortunately, though, it really doesn't matter -- Windows developers have to use VS, Mac/iOS developers have to use Xcode and Android developers (mostly) have to use Android Studio. It doesn't matter if Xcode is better or if VS is better or whatever -- you can't (easily) develop for Windows with Xcode or for iOS with VS, so it ultimately doesn't matter. The default IDE for a platform is going to be the primary way to develop apps for that platform.
WaltFrench - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
I think it's fair to say that Swift was invented to make developing for Apple <i>more approachable</i>, as it lacks the strange-looking Obj-C message-passing orientation, and <i>more productive</i>, as the language design is less tedious and the playground instant-feedback will be very helpful.These are both good objectives, and no doubt they'll be achieved. But there's no reason to think that Apple had OTHER goals, such as using Swift for non-Apple situations, and its high specificity to Mac/iOS situations is a reminder that generic languages, and languages designed for Microsoft environments, <b>by definition</b> would be less useful.
V900 - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
PROTIP: Don't comment on stuff you don't have a whiff of a clue about. It only makes you look very stupid.Reading this article and summing it up as: "Apple comes up with dumb solution to gotofail issue" is kinda like reading a book about the Apollo program, and summing it up as: "Guy plants flag in new and unusual place!"
c3p - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
I'm not sure about the enforced brackets. Sure it solves a problem, but it might make the code less readable and thus decreasing quality.Compare to variable name "m_pifoo" , for member variable foo which is a pointer to an integer. Sure you know what the member is and you immediately see if you accidentially add it to a short, but overall it's a bad idea.
Everything else looks good (";" should have died years ago)
lmcd - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
The semicolon means we're not whitespace-dependent... Don't ever wish it away -_-MrSpadge - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
It works very well for Matlab: you don't need to put a semicolon at the end. If you don't the result of the statment is simply output to the command line. If you want a statement to stretch multiple lines you have to explicitly tell so by adding "..." at the end of the line. I really like it: no harm is done by forgetting a semicolon, yet no white-space dependence exists.DERSS - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
The cases where some languages allow omission of figure brackets for "if" statements are less readable as I always try to understand where the command actually ends.grahaman27 - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
The semicolon is useful for syntactical clarity. I do not see the argument against the semi colon as being valid. Is there really that much frustration with missing semi colons, and is it really worth it. Any programmer with any experience knows to put a semi colon at the end.xakor - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
c3p is correct, semicolon is only a notion of familiarity, people familiar with any language in the ML family have dropped the semicolon and never looked back. That is, if you have an expression-based language as opposed to statements-based which is another solid flaw in Swift's design.bji - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
I disagree about semicolon. It makes certain complex multi-line expressions easier to read. And it's so easy and automatic. Kind of line typing a period at the end of a sentence. Or is that too hard for lazy programmers too?leomoty - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
I kinda lost the interest in reading this article after "they are calling Type Inference". Type inference is well known and widely spread among the programming languages. I agree with maxiniu, most of these features are on C#, and even, if you wanna code for iOS you could always use Xamarin's MonoTouch.elsumidero - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
I smiled at "Apple has included a feature they are calling Type Inference" and I started laughing at"One of the most powerful features of Swift is something Apple is calling Generics".
As other people commented here, all those features are already present in current languages like C# since years ago. They are now revolutionary just because Apple is selling them? Come on!
lmcd - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Yeah I didn't know we got an Apple Press Release Center on Anandtech. I thought only AMD had bought that as of now?DERSS - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
No one has said they are revolutionary or were absent in other languages. So, what was your point again?ArmanUV - Thursday, June 12, 2014 - link
When you say "One of the most powerful features of Swift is something Apple is calling Generics", it implies that Apple is introducing this new exclusive feature, even though generics are a common feature of many other programming languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_programming)...It is almost like saying "One of the most powerful features of Swift is something Apple is calling Functions"!
Deelron - Thursday, June 12, 2014 - link
No, it it states it's a powerful new feature that didn't exist before, which it absolutely is. It's no different then saying "this <car type> features a powerful new engine <that's more powerful then the previous one but came on a different model before>."tdlf - Wednesday, June 18, 2014 - link
Except Apple never said any of this. This is a poorly-written article. All Apple ever said was that they're including Generics in Swift. They never even used the word, "introduced."MrSpadge - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Yeah.. I also hoped to find something intersting here. Sure it's better than that language which starts with "C" and ends with "obol".. but not much more.kushiku - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Elimination of semi-colons, Type Inference, String commutation - aren't all these already present in Python. Generics? Oh come on...so many languages have that featureAtleast from the features mentioned in the article...I don't find anything new woth revolutionary
Its just old wine in new bottle...fancy names and a brand called Apple
Brandon Chester - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
I think people are misunderstanding the point of this. Swift is only for people who program in ObjC, it's not intended to attract people who program in other languages because that would involve locking into Apple's platform. Your way of thinking puts Apple in a damned if they do, damned if they don't scenario. If ObjC stays the way it is it gets even more stagnant which hurts Apple developers and users. If Apple tries to remedy issues by creating something like Swift then people complain that they're all just features from other languages.elsumidero - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
I think that no one have a problem with Apple launching a new language, the problem is how the article is written. With phrases like "One of the most powerful features of Swift is something Apple is calling Generics".Apple and EVERYONE is calling it Generics. Apple did not invented Generics, there were Generics before Swift. But writing the article in this way it may suggest to the reader that Apple invented all those features that were already present in many of other existing programming languages.
Arbee - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Yeah, Apple didn't invent any of this naming, and they didn't claim to. It was a known thing for years that Objective C was increasingly out of sync with modern programming conveniences (Ars Technica in particular was sounding that alarm early) and this fixes it in a pretty clean way. There was a rumor at WWDC that it'll be open sourced as part of the next LLVM major release too, which would be terrific.BTW, this article misses one of the significant points about Swift: it can also be used as a batch/scripting language complete with the traditional #!/bin/swift or whatever header, and Xcode's Playground feature uses it in that mode to provide the sort of immediate-response environment that all of us who learned programming in the 1980s on BASIC for granted. Except on steroids: no 1980s BASIC would graph the value of a variable over time for you, or show the actual picture file that you just loaded.
lmcd - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Given the .NET roots of PowerShell, I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft quickly build the equivalent features for PowerShell.ex2bot - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Somehow, I don't think Apple developers will be able to take advantage of PowerShell. :)kushiku - Saturday, June 14, 2014 - link
@Brandon Chester This is what exactly I meanttwotwotwo - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Posts about new phones look at them in the context of other phones. This misses a lot of the context of the language, some of which goes back decades (type inference: ML, 1970s) and is gratefully acknowledged by Swift's lead creator (http://www.nondot.org/sabre/).You're not into other languages and this is not a programming site, which is all fine, but I guess researching what others say or maybe running drafts by folks who *do* geek out on this stuff might help avoid accidentally taunting the commenting hordes.
jmmx - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
No one claims that Apple invented any of these features. They have, however, put them together in their own way which may or may not be creative or useful - certainly not useful to those who eschew Apple programming.This does not change the fact that it is a positive advancement for those who do program for iOS.
Additionally, the naysayers have forgotten 2 things:
1 - the interactive environment, and
2 - it runs literally 10x faster than Python
DERSS - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Python is incredibly slow language, it is totally different league.And, again, no one ever called Swift "revolutionary".
Daniel Egger - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Python is anything but slow. In fact I've written scientific Python software that smoked C++ software even without converting selected functions to C and it took only a fraction of the time to write it.The only problem Python has is the global interpreter lock which makes utilizing multiple CPU cores very annoying and tricky and may or may not be reason why Apple claims there's 10 fold improvement in select cases.
I'd rather they created a Python LLVM frontend than inventing yet another language. Iff they decide to opensource the compiler I might have another look otherwise Swift for me personally is a dead fish in the water...
jameskatt - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Sure, this feature is in Python. But Python runs 10 times slower than Swift.tdlf - Wednesday, June 18, 2014 - link
I developed exclusively in C# for 7 years. What's new about Swift that this article didn't touch on:Swift can be used as a system level language and, based on my own tests, it's faster than C and C++. Having a type safe, modern language that you could develop an OS in is a big deal in my opinion. Whether Apple opens the spec remains to be seen, but if they do, it will be a valuable contribution to the development community.
Arnulf - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
ROTFL at that goto example ... Usage of goto in high level languages is generally frowned upon nowadays (and has been for quite some time).It's bad enough that Apple admits their programmers are inept lamers who are too thick to use other language constructs to work around goto statements, but what makes it even worse is to use this particular example to make that point and then try to spin it into something positive, while complaining about another statement termination method (the semi-colon) that this "new" language does away with.
This entire piece reeks horribly of Apple fanboism and really isn't something I ever expected to see on AT.
Mondozai - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Your comment managed to check every negative stereotype about a passive aggressive fanboy on the internet(including the obsessive accusation that everyone else is).But it is hilarious, so please continue.
ex2bot - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Funny thing about that is that a lot of these programmers bounce around tech firms. If they're good enough for Apple, they probably either a) came from Microsoft and/or Google, or b) they'll be moving on to Microsoft and/or Google.Also, let's be honest, it's a bit of a game, isn't it? I don't know if you develop for Apple or not, but I'm guessing you have a strong affiliation for one of the other tech giants, Msoft or Ggle. And you're reading and commenting on an article that's likely intended for Apple developers. What's the name of that game? What is it?
Is it SATAN!?
Damn you, autocorrect!! I mean, is it Fanboyism??
Now, isn't that special? :)
jameskatt - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Go to still exists in Visual Basic.dugbug - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
I am at a loss and disappointed in the comments that toy with 'apple fail' and C# nonsense. If you just want more anandtech reviews of power supplies use the filter. Fanboying your language so you can be first to throw a zinger misses the point of this language.In the meantime, the language was built by the LLVM/CLANG guy, and should be taken seriously. Its claim to fame is the ability to program similar to scripting languages, but be compiled and type-safe for performance. Syntactic sugar is culled from several languages, including C#. This is stated as much.
I hope to see more detailed review of this language as its not often a major tech player starts one. We had Java from Sun, C# from MS, 'Go' from google, and now swift from Apple.
Duraz0rz - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Should be taken seriously by who? If you're an iOS developer, then sure, you should take it seriously. Otherwise, there's no point in Swift as other languages are more mature, have a large ecosystem to draw from, and aren't locked down to a particular platform.jameskatt - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
The whole point of Swift is to serve Apple's developers - no one else. Other languages simply don't play a role or can do as well as Swift since Swift is part of Apple's whole development system and other languages would need a lot of work, time and politics and committees just to get the changes Apple wants.lmcd - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
You're mistaking author credibility with good ideas. Instead of this pointless new language, the author could've written (or taken an existing) Python LLVM backend, extended it with Generics and whatever iOS-specific and OSX-specific APIs were needed, and called it a day. No need to reinvent the wheel.Mondozai - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
As others have said, there is a lot more to swift. You're basing your comment on a singel article, and a pretty incomplete one at that.Swift can be a lot faster on specific tasks than other languages, as well as the interactivity.
There's tons more technical details in the guide. I haven't finished it yet, but you should do your research before spouting nonsense about a language which you know little to nothing about. A single AT article isn't good enough.
Ktracho - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
What would be helpful is a pointer to an article that explains the motivation of Swift, and why it couldn't be done as an evolution of Objective C/C++ or as a command line option when invoking the compiler (as in something like "-objc-2014"). Asking everyone to download the handbook and read it to answer this question is not very helpful. I'm sure Apple had to document in writing what the justification for developing a new language was, so it shouldn't be hard for them to share what some of these points are to make it easy for others to write this type of article about Swift.ex2bot - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Cough, WWDC Keynote./Cough
lmcd - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
It isn't the language that's fast... It's the best-practices and the method of deployment (precompiled, JIT or interpreted).I don't need to know about Swift to see its objectives. They're clearly stated -- basically a scripting language with some muscle behind it. Which is why a compiled form of the most common scripting language with iOS-specific extensions added would fit.
The top-level syntactical sugar doesn't affect (much of) what can be done with a language, so reinventing the wheel is a valid complaint no matter the motivation.
ex2bot - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
I'm not a big expert on it, but I don't think that's right. It's not a scripting language, it's a modification of Objective-C, a general purpose language. Someone wrote that you could mix in BASH scripting (I didn't know that). You can also write code that mixes Swift and Objective-C. But it's not just a scripting lg.DERSS - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
You might want to read the documentation. There is a lot more than just Generics that differ Swift from Python. It makes no sense to drag the baggage of Python.uhuznaa - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Swift is totally irrelevant if you're not coding for OS X or iOS. Apple isn't trying to establish a new programming language here (Swift has basically nothing to offer you couldn't have easier and better supported with other languages), Apple is just trying to offer an alternative to Objective-C to code for OS X and iOS. If you do that, you have more options now. If you don't, nothing has changed.C++ and other languages aren't really suited to an environment that grew out of NeXTStep, that in turn was developed with Objective-C. If you don't need to work with the Cocoa frameworks and everything else around that, you'd be an idiot to use Swift. But if you do, Swift looks like a more modern and less baroque alternative to Objective-C.
Arbee - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Actually, there was a rumor at WWDC that Swift will be included in the next LLVM major release, under the same UIUC/BSD license as the rest of LLVM and Clang. And Swift is entirely usable for non-NeXTStep scenarios, just as C# has found use far outside of Windows.uhuznaa - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Yes, it may be "usable" elsewhere then, but still not much more than a novelty. There's no shortage of interesting programming languages and as far as these go Swift is even not very much interesting.Another thing when it comes to Apple and programming languages: In addition to AppleScript you can now use JavaScript in OS X Yosemite to automate UI apps. This too is totally uninteresting in general terms. It's really big news though if you happen to have a need to automate Mac apps because you can finally stop fighting one of the worst programming languages ever invented (AppleScript is about the opposite of Perl: It's very easy to read and very, very hard to write).
MartenKL - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Here is to hoping Visual Studio gets a C# compiler for iOS (and a playground emulator of course). I agree with most comments, both positive and negative but why let? const is so well established.et20 - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Because const is the opposite of established, it's actually widely ignored.It's better to have let because it's shorter than const but the same length as var.
lmcd - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
I see your name is ET, which would explain the extraterrestrial understanding of "const." It's widely used.et20 - Thursday, June 12, 2014 - link
And you are profoundly human in your attack towards the messenger and denial of reality.Const is widely known and rarely used.
#define is used for constants at least an order of magnitude more often than const.
In languages without preprocessor almost all uses of const are as substitutes for #define.
The usage of const in imperative languages is laughably small compared to the usage of let in functional languages.
eanazag - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
The real news here is that I can now program in emojii. Woohoo!ex2bot - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
I can see sooo many problems with using bananas and winky faces as variable names!VAR :) = just chillin' yo
uhuznaa - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
There's more to Unicode than just emojii. Everybody outside the US knows that.RamarC - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
GOTO for exception handling??? hopefully that's a BAD example and not par for the course.name99 - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link
Jesus. NOTHING brings out the bikeshedders faster than a new language.When I read this thread, there were 59 comments of which I'd rate about THREE as providing useful information rather than moronic whining.
Well done, AnandTech! Probably a new record.
iwod - Thursday, June 12, 2014 - link
I think people are missing the point here.Swift is Apple's attempt to being a new, and modern Programming Languages that offers *interoperability* with Objective-C.
ArmanUV - Thursday, June 12, 2014 - link
Wow that article was way worse than what I expect from AnandTech.Ryan Smith - Thursday, June 12, 2014 - link
We're always looking to improve our future articles. Was there anything in particular that you didn't care for? Or were expecting (for a mid-length article) that wasn't in this article?et20 - Thursday, June 12, 2014 - link
It was a somewhat positive article about Apple.How dare you?
mkozakewich - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link
These seem like small generic aesthetic changes that don't require more than a couple lines of commentary. What are the real differences in this language?Spoony - Wednesday, June 18, 2014 - link
Worth noting that the lead developer of Swift at Apple has publicly said many times that he tried to take the parts he thought were good from many other languages and blend them together. Rust, C#, Obj-C, Python, and more. That it is a pragmatic and modern language for Apple and their developers to use.So of course it takes pieces of other languages. Of course it is good at some things and bad at some others. It isn't a revolutionary thing for the world, it's just evolutionary for one ecosystem. Taken in that context, Swift seems pretty decent to me. Some of the funky unfinished constructs and compiler bugs aside... apparently it is effectively in "beta" at this point.