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As a mostly-Java, Android and web apps type of developer who's only recently gotten into ObjectiveC iOS app development, I have two questions for the community:

As a mostly-Java, Android and web apps type of developer who's only recently gotten into ObjectiveC iOS app development, I have two questions for the community: 1. Will Swift be cross-platform or is it going to be strictly for MacOS X and iOS app development? 2. Will Swift apps run on older versions of OS X and iOS? I've seen differing opinions (e.g., http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24001778/do-swift-based-applications-work-on-os-x-10-9-ios-7-and-lower http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24001778/do-swift-based-a...)

jamieomatthews 12y ago
Personally I think Swift could really change things for apple if it could be used for server side scripting. An integration with core data, and you could easily share Models on the client and server side. It would make it a no brainer language to use for a mobile app, because you could kill two birds with one stone. To date however, apple has made no comment about cross platform development
- Touche 12y ago
  But you'd have to use Mac servers, right?
  - jamieomatthews 12y ago
    Unless they open source it, yes. Knowing apple, I feel that they would have an off the shelf solution that you could just push code to. Almost like a parse type solution, integrated through Xcode.
rsynnott 12y ago
1) Possibly. It seems likely that it'll be open-sourced sooner or later, like Clang was. Everything said by Apple people has been cautiously positive on this front. However, it doesn't have much of a standard library as part of the language itself at the moment, being heavily dependent on Cocoa stuff. GNUStep/Cocotron could presumably be used. 2) Yes; Swift apps run on iOS 7 and up, and MacOS 10.9 and up. There currently seem to be some bugs which turn up on iOS7 but not 8 or vice versa, but Swift is quite buggy in general at the moment, and this will probably be cleaned up.

jamieomatthews 12y ago

Personally I think Swift could really change things for apple if it could be used for server side scripting. An integration with core data, and you could easily share Models on the client and server side. It would make it a no brainer language to use for a mobile app, because you could kill two birds with one stone. To date however, apple has made no comment about cross platform development

Touche 12y ago
But you'd have to use Mac servers, right?
- jamieomatthews 12y ago
  Unless they open source it, yes. Knowing apple, I feel that they would have an off the shelf solution that you could just push code to. Almost like a parse type solution, integrated through Xcode.

rsynnott 12y ago

1) Possibly. It seems likely that it'll be open-sourced sooner or later, like Clang was. Everything said by Apple people has been cautiously positive on this front. However, it doesn't have much of a standard library as part of the language itself at the moment, being heavily dependent on Cocoa stuff. GNUStep/Cocotron could presumably be used. 2) Yes; Swift apps run on iOS 7 and up, and MacOS 10.9 and up. There currently seem to be some bugs which turn up on iOS7 but not 8 or vice versa, but Swift is quite buggy in general at the moment, and this will probably be cleaned up.