Apple announced a new programming language native to both OS X and iOS: Swift at the Worldwide Developers Conference WWDC 2014 Developer conference today. This new language is poised to replace Objective-C as the main programming language on Apple’s platforms
Swift seems to get rid of Objective C’s reliance on defined pointers; instead, the compiler infers the variable type, just as many scripting languages do. At the same time, it provides modern features similar to those found in C++ and Java, like well-defined namespaces, generics, and operator overloading. From the few fragments of code shown during the demo, Swift appears to rely heavily on the dot-notation that Apple introduced in an earlier iteration of Objective C.
According to Apple, Swift will provide a number of significant speed advantages to developers. A complex object sort, for example, will run 3.9x faster than an implementation of the same algorithm in Python. That’s also faster than Objective-C, which is 2.8x faster than the Python version.
“When it comes to speed Swift is great. Swift is also modern with features like closures, multiple return types, and namespaces. Swift is completely native to both Cocoa and Cocoa touch,” said Apple’s Craig Federighi
“Swift is going to be ready for prime time out of the gate and will feature “complete Xcode support.” Additionally, as soon as iOS and OS X are made available developers “can submit Swift apps to the App Store.” adds Federighi
For anxious developers here is a look of the “Playground”
Techmoran will have an in depth look at this Programming Language and see whether it is easier to get started with than Objective C and how it relates with other languages. Apple will be releasing the Documentation iBook soon.
Here is a LINK to the developer Site