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From a user's point of view, it's basically straight out of the Rust book, all the gravy with also relaxed ownership and syntax. It has it all [1]: static typi

From a user's point of view, it's basically straight out of the Rust book, all the gravy with also relaxed ownership and syntax. It has it all [1]: static typing, type inference, explicit mutability, closures, pattern matching, optionals (with own syntax! also "any"), generics, interfaces, weak ownership, tuples, plus other nifty things like shorthand syntax, final and explicit override... It screams "modern!", has all the latest circlejerk features. It even comes with a light-table/bret-victor style playground. But is still a practical language which looks approachable and straightforward. Edit: [1]: well, almost. I don't think I've caught anything about generators, first-class concurrency and parallelism, or tail-call optimization, among others.

kibwen 12y ago
Indeed, I'm not sure what Swift's concurrency story is yet. Other than that it's encouragingly similar to Rust (we're evolving in the right direction!), but not quite as low-level.
- mkehrt 12y ago
  I'm sure that the main mechanism will be the existing dispatch queue libraries Apple's other languages use.
- Pacabel 12y ago
  The similarity to Rust should scare the hell out of Rust's creators and proponents. Swift could very well render Rust almost totally irrelevant within the OS X and iOS sphere of software development. If we end up eventually seeing Swift implemented for other platforms, then the chances of Rust's long-term success diminish even more. Things might have been different had a stable, even if somewhat imperfect, initial version of Rust had been released by now, thus allowing it to gain some adoption and traction. I hope that the "But Rust isn't targeting those developers!" argument isn't used to try to justify this mistake, as well. Rust is already facing stiff competition from languages like Go, C++11, C++14, Scala and even Java 8. With the announcement of Swift, Rust's niche and audience are getting smaller, further preventing the widespread adoption that's necessary for a programming language to become truly successful.
  - kibwen 12y ago
    Oh hello again, Pacabel. I'm familiar with your game by now. :) We're not scared in the slightest. I'll reconsider when Swift has inline ASM, allocators, linear types, move semantics by default, region analysis, and a type system that guarantees freedom from data races (oh, and when the code is open-sourced, and targets both Linux and Windows as a first-class citizen). Swift isn't intended to be a systems language: it's an application language. Anyone who's capable of choosing Swift as of today was just as capable of choosing Objective-C yesterday. And as the Rust developers themselves have discovered over the past two years, deciding to become a systems language doesn't happen overnight. (In fact, on a personal note, I'm ecstatic that Swift has been announced. ADTs! Optional types! Pattern matching! Think of how many features are no longer alien to people who want to learn Rust! And hell, the syntax is incredibly similar as well, which further reduces friction. As a hardcore Rust contributor, I want to shake the hand of each and every one of Swift's designers.)
    - VeejayRampay 12y ago
      I saw a lot of people mention ADT in relation to Swift but I haven't found examples in the documentation book I downloaded from Apple. Would you be kind enough to provide the example you saw? EDIT: My bad, page 40 in the section about protocols (unless I'm missing something).
      - tel 12y ago
        It's on the bottom half of the page about enumerations. Typically languages have product types, but lack true sum types. Swift's enums provide such leverage. That said, Swift's types are a bit less than recursive, so there's a bit of niggling still before you get to the affordances of something like Haskell's `data`.
        VeejayRampay 12y ago
        Thank you.
    - jsmthrowaway 12y ago
- pjmlp 12y ago
  Most likely use the Grand Central Dispatch that is already part of iOS and Mac OS X.
stormbrew 12y ago
I don't really see anything but a superficial resemblance to rust, where both are borrowing ideas from the same place. Where Rust really differs from modern algol-family-languages-learning-from-30-year-old-functional-programming-research is in its strictness. The optional type stuff is good, and it will definitely be a net safety improvement, but it's by no means attempting to approach a panacea to safety like Rust's strict static analysis does. Particularly that Swift gives you really simple outs in the form of the '!' unwrap and 'as' (should be 'as!' at least imo) downcast-and-unwrap operators that result in run-time errors and will probably be seen as unremoveable code-smell in a couple of years.

kibwen 12y ago

Indeed, I'm not sure what Swift's concurrency story is yet. Other than that it's encouragingly similar to Rust (we're evolving in the right direction!), but not quite as low-level.

mkehrt 12y ago
I'm sure that the main mechanism will be the existing dispatch queue libraries Apple's other languages use.
Pacabel 12y ago
The similarity to Rust should scare the hell out of Rust's creators and proponents. Swift could very well render Rust almost totally irrelevant within the OS X and iOS sphere of software development. If we end up eventually seeing Swift implemented for other platforms, then the chances of Rust's long-term success diminish even more. Things might have been different had a stable, even if somewhat imperfect, initial version of Rust had been released by now, thus allowing it to gain some adoption and traction. I hope that the "But Rust isn't targeting those developers!" argument isn't used to try to justify this mistake, as well. Rust is already facing stiff competition from languages like Go, C++11, C++14, Scala and even Java 8. With the announcement of Swift, Rust's niche and audience are getting smaller, further preventing the widespread adoption that's necessary for a programming language to become truly successful.
- kibwen 12y ago
  Oh hello again, Pacabel. I'm familiar with your game by now. :) We're not scared in the slightest. I'll reconsider when Swift has inline ASM, allocators, linear types, move semantics by default, region analysis, and a type system that guarantees freedom from data races (oh, and when the code is open-sourced, and targets both Linux and Windows as a first-class citizen). Swift isn't intended to be a systems language: it's an application language. Anyone who's capable of choosing Swift as of today was just as capable of choosing Objective-C yesterday. And as the Rust developers themselves have discovered over the past two years, deciding to become a systems language doesn't happen overnight. (In fact, on a personal note, I'm ecstatic that Swift has been announced. ADTs! Optional types! Pattern matching! Think of how many features are no longer alien to people who want to learn Rust! And hell, the syntax is incredibly similar as well, which further reduces friction. As a hardcore Rust contributor, I want to shake the hand of each and every one of Swift's designers.)
  - VeejayRampay 12y ago
    I saw a lot of people mention ADT in relation to Swift but I haven't found examples in the documentation book I downloaded from Apple. Would you be kind enough to provide the example you saw? EDIT: My bad, page 40 in the section about protocols (unless I'm missing something).
    - tel 12y ago
      It's on the bottom half of the page about enumerations. Typically languages have product types, but lack true sum types. Swift's enums provide such leverage. That said, Swift's types are a bit less than recursive, so there's a bit of niggling still before you get to the affordances of something like Haskell's `data`.
      - VeejayRampay 12y ago
        Thank you.
  - jsmthrowaway 12y ago
pjmlp 12y ago
Most likely use the Grand Central Dispatch that is already part of iOS and Mac OS X.

stormbrew 12y ago

I don't really see anything but a superficial resemblance to rust, where both are borrowing ideas from the same place. Where Rust really differs from modern algol-family-languages-learning-from-30-year-old-functional-programming-research is in its strictness. The optional type stuff is good, and it will definitely be a net safety improvement, but it's by no means attempting to approach a panacea to safety like Rust's strict static analysis does. Particularly that Swift gives you really simple outs in the form of the '!' unwrap and 'as' (should be 'as!' at least imo) downcast-and-unwrap operators that result in run-time errors and will probably be seen as unremoveable code-smell in a couple of years.