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There's been a lot of prior discussion about Swift on HN. I think the general consensus is that it's a fun and somewhat-well designed language that's buggy in p
by josephpmay 12y ago
There's been a lot of prior discussion about Swift on HN. I think the general consensus is that it's a fun and somewhat-well designed language that's buggy in places but will eventually make a good Objective-C replacement. I personally have enjoyed playing around with it. If Apple open-sources it, I could see using it as my main language (to replace Java, which I hate).
- dnissley 12y agoWhy wait? There's already a language that bears a strong resemblance to Swift and it even has Java interop baked in. That would be Scala.
- josephpmay 12y agoI want to get away from the JVM
- revscat 12y agoMind if I ask why?
- josephpmay 12y agoThese are probably not very good reasons, however: -It's slow -It's annoying for testing -It's run by Oracle -It feels antiquated
- curtis17 12y agoSame here. I want to get away from Java and the JVM. Twenty years old and now owned by Oracle.
- zmmmmm 12y agoIf you want a strong resemblance, Swift looks spookily like Groovy - to the point where I have to actually check sometimes that I'm not reading Groovy code. I would say much more so than Scala.
- vorg 12y agoThe examples on the first page of the documentation ( https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/TheBasics.html https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/documenta... ) are: let maximumNumberOfLoginAttempts = 10 // let keyword var currentLoginAttempt = 0 // var keyword var welcomeMessage: String //type postfixed after colon if turnipsAreDelicious { // no parens around if-condition println("Mmm, tasty turnips!") } let http404Error = (404, "Not Found") //tuple println("The status code is \(statusCode)") //interpolated string uses \( ... ) I don't think the syntax looks like Groovy at all!
- tjl 12y agoSwift can call Objective-C APIs, so if you're building Mac or iOS apps, you'll get access to the full Cocoa API. You can't build iOS apps in Scala (as far as I know) and I've never been a fan of Java GUIs.
- pjmlp 12y agoJust compile to native code using an AOT compiler like RoboVM.
- Stubb 12y agoYup. Everyone has different needs from their code, an mine primarily needs to run on Linux despite often working on it in OS X. Ruby does that beautifully now. I can't see spending time on Swift until it runs across Unix flavors. That seems quite possible in principal since Swift relies on LLVM.
- pjmlp 12y agoWhy bother when OCaml and Haskell already have more compilers to choose from?