Having written android apps and never having written an ObjC app, swift was a combination of confusion, aha moments, and wtfs. In particular, not so much the language itself, the lack of any kind of well supported and well used package management is rather lame. I don't know if this is something I should expect as I haven't worked with ObjC but coming from python and java land I don't really like submoduling in my dependencies and wiring all of them into the build system via the GUI.
Since that's been written, CocoaPods has added Swift support. As of a few weeks ago it's currently available in beta (gem install cocoapods --pre).
To the OP, CocoaPods is probably the most widely-used package manager, but there's also Carthage too, which is decentralised: https://github.com/Carthage/Carthage
It'd be nice if Apple had an official package manager but they seem to want to stay out of it (see Homebrew/MacPorts on OS X too).
Yes, at least initially. I don't if any Apple employees still contribute to MacPorts, though. Apple does still provide hosting and infrastructure to the project, for what it's worth.
