

Swift Blog - sferik
https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/

======
clayallsopp
Wow, this is an interesting/refreshing development from Apple. I can't recall
them ever having a public blog to communicate with their developer community.
Until now, it's mostly been through their developer forums, private support,
and in-person at the yearly WWDC.

How they've developed as a developer-facing company this year is really
encouraging. Google et al have always been transparent as glass relative to
Apple's iOS work, but this blog, the twitter dialog from Swift's development
team, and the no-NDA release of iOS8 has really changed my opinion of the
direction they're pushing the ecosystem.

~~~
darthgoogle
Well, let's just wait and see, because frankly, I'm tired of reading marketing
fluff like "We can’t wait to see what you build!".

After years in the making (which means plenty of time to think of an answer),
one of the most important questions still hasn't been answered, and not even
mentioned on the blog.

Namely, will Swift be open-source and submitted to standards bodies? Will key
libraries also be released?

If I make an investment to learn Swift, what are the chances that I can take
this knowledge and use it outside of the Apple ecosystem? Or is Swift destined
to follow the fate of Objective-C and be completely useless outside of Mac/iOS
apps?

~~~
austinz
Their lack of transparency on this matter sucks, but at least they haven't
committed to making it proprietary:
[http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-June/073698....](http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2014-June/073698.html)

~~~
darthgoogle
Interesting thread. Not buying Chris's (with his Apple hat on) answer though.

The idea that you spend a few years to create a new language and have not even
had a discussion yet about whether or not it will be open source is simply not
credible.

Unless Swift was rushed to release because companies like Apportable were
making too much progress and they wanted to herd developers back into the pens
with new proprietary languages and APIs e.g. Metal.

~~~
jaegerpicker
Have you ever worked at a company that open sources code? I mean it's fairly
common, even VERY common that the devs are all for open sourcing the product
but the legal department has not made a decision yet. Engineers move at an
incredibly swift, no pun intended, pace but Lawyers tend to take glacial ages
to decide anything. It's completely and totally credible that the legal
department hasn't given their final ok on things, especially at a company like
Apple and as large as Apple is.

~~~
mythz
How is "incredibly swift, no pun intended, pace" not intended?

It's an unnatural forced use of the term expressly for that purpose, expressly
saying something _is not_ exactly what it _is_ , isn't in anyway accidental.

~~~
jaegerpicker
How is it unnatural moving at swift pace is a very common phrase. I can think
of several times that I and others have said it.

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equalarrow
This is great news. Apple seems to be going the proactive route with all this.
I think that's a really good idea on their part.

That said, as soon as I saw Swift was announced, I took the plunge and started
my own journal about learning Swift.

[http://www.swiftpursuit.com](http://www.swiftpursuit.com)

Figured I'd document my progress as I went along and it's been a lot of fun so
far. This is something I plan on doing over the long haul and I'd like to get
in some small 5-10 min videos that covers not only the language but also new
things coming out in XCode as well.

I'm two posts behind, but I'm trying to release a new post every week. My
biggest slow down has just been figuring out the blogging software and
hosting.

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arturhoo
I am currently downloading XCode 6.3 Beta [1] without being a registered
developer (used my ordinary credentials), does that mean that I will be able
to write applications and play with the REPL? Has it just been made available?

[1]
[https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/download.action?path=/...](https://developer.apple.com/devcenter/download.action?path=/Developer_Tools/xcode_6_beta_3_lpw27r/xcode_6_beta_3.dmg)

~~~
Osmium
I believe so–that's what the blog says at least!

Would've been nice if they'd done this from the start (says someone who just
paid his registration fee last month solely for access to the new XCode
beta/Swift) but better late than never. Maybe there was some strategic value
in only letting paying devs have access it for the first month or so as the
news settled in...

~~~
josephlord
Beta 1 was really pretty flakey and Xcode tended to crash every 20 minutes or
so. Beta 3 is much better. I suspect the quality and readiness for a
potentially less friendly audience is what caused them to keep it to
registered devs rather than an attempt to get more cash.

Hopefully you end up getting some value from your registration. You could
always ask for a refund but I don't know if they would give it to you.

~~~
Osmium
> I suspect the quality and readiness for a potentially less friendly audience
> is what caused them to keep it to registered devs rather than an attempt to
> get more cash.

Probably true.

> Hopefully you end up getting some value from your registration.

Definitely got some value :) For one, I had the time to play around with it
last month, that I don't have this month, so for that alone it was worth it.
So not bitter about it!

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kennethfriedman
It's really great to see Apple opening up - maybe not in their products, but
in their culture. Programming language blog, a presence on social networks
(mostly Twitter), posing for pictures with devs at WWDC, and generally
embracing the dev community. All of these individual things seem small but
together show a much more open side of Apple.

A side effect of these changes: Apple can control their own story now; whereas
the rumor mill and the Apple-Needs-To-Release-A-New-Category-In-The-
Next-30-Days-Or-They-Are-Doomed websites have been controlling their
story/image for the past couple years.

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BlackLamb
Great timing, was just reading the Swift ebook

    
    
       let interestingNumbers = [
        "Prime": [2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13],
        "Fibonacci": [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8],
        "Square": [1, 4, 9, 16, 25],
      ]
      var largest = 0
       for (kind, numbers) in interestingNumbers {
        for number in numbers {
            if number > largest {
                largest = number
              }
          }
        }
        largest
    

Excerpt From: Apple Inc. “The Swift Programming Language.”

~~~
josephlord
Note that if you downloaded the original book into iBooks you need to delete
it and download it again to get the version that matches Beta3 (fixed array
semantics and new range operator ..<)

~~~
tjl
Did both the Swift books get updated or just the one?

~~~
josephlord
It looks like they both did along with examples. I don't know if the changes
are significant[0].

Revision history for main book:

[https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/RevisionHistory.html)

[0]
[https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/navigatio...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/navigation/)
and search for "swift". All the docs seem to have July dates.

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wonderzombie
Slightly off-topic: is this the first time Apple has hosted a blog? I realize
it's developer.apple.com rather than apple.com, but still.

~~~
CodeWithCoffee
Steve Jobs blogged on Apple's main site
[https://www.apple.com/hotnews/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/), including
the famous Thoughts on Flash article [https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-
on-flash/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/).

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matthewwiese
I like the idea of a blog, something where I can get official news and tips
from is great. Perfect supplemental reading for all those blogs run by outside
developers. I look forward to using Swift.

Also, for those that may have missed it, you can use Swift in XCode 6 beta, so
long as you are a registered Apple Developer.

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Kluny
Has anyone used Swift yet? Report please?

~~~
archagon
I've been using it for my latest project. Haven't done anything too fancy with
it yet. Lack of automatic type conversion between ints and floats is driving
me up the wall a little bit, but maybe that's a personal flaw rather than a
flaw with the language. String manipulation is also incredibly confusing to
me: I have yet to figure out how to get the number of characters in a string,
or how to generate a random character. Other than that, it feels pretty nice
to use.

EDIT: also how to get character n in a string.

~~~
TylerE
In general, there are good reasons to not do implicit casts, especially
between ints and floats. For one, it's actually a fairly expensive operation.

~~~
Locke1689
Eh, not really. Certainly conversions from int->long should be implicit (I
don't know if they are in Swift, though).

