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"Swift is Apple’s new programming language, said by many to ‘replace’ Objective-C. This is not the case. I’ve spent some time reverse engineering Swift binaries
by agentcoops 12y ago
"Swift is Apple’s new programming language, said by many to ‘replace’ Objective-C. This is not the case. I’ve spent some time reverse engineering Swift binaries and the runtime, and I’ve found out quite a bit about it."
Correct me if I'm wrong (and my point certainly isn't meant to detract from the interest of looking more in-depth at Swift internals), but this article doesn't appear to support this claim at all. It seems equivalent to saying Scala isn't meant to replace Java, or C assembly, because at the end of compilation it's all just Java. Abstraction is real. Also, Apple is providing a "migration guide" for porting Objective-C apps over to Swift. Nothing is conclusive, obviously, but certainly the article does not show that Apple doesn't intend for Swift to ultimately replace Objective-C as the primary language of Mac development.
- gilgoomesh 12y agoYeah, the article's technical analysis is good but I'm not sure what this line was supposed to say: what it actually says is wrong. Swift is definitely intended to replace Objective-C. Perhaps that line in article meant that it's not binary identical to Objective-C. Swift classes definitely use different method invocation semantics (unless you adorn the class with the @objc attribute).