If you’re an iOS or OS X developer, chances are you’re going to want to read up on Apple’s all new programming language called Swift. Apple just went live with all of the details on it, including a book titled “The Swift Programming Language,” which is now live in the iBooks Store.
Swift will allow developers to create iOS and OS X apps, it hopes, quicker than before, and it works side-by-side with the Objective C language. Here’s how the company describes it on its site:
Swift is the result of the latest research on programming languages, combined with decades of experience building Apple platforms. Named parameters brought forward from Objective-C are expressed in a clean syntax that makes APIs in Swift even easier to read and maintain. Inferred types make code cleaner and less prone to mistakes, while modules eliminate headers and provide namespaces. Memory is managed automatically, and you don’t even need to type semi-colons.
Apple said that Swift will “eliminate entire classes of unsafe code,” and that it was designed to be “fast and powerful,” allowing developers to create the next generation of iOS applications. The Swift code is available today, and Apple said that any apps developed with it can be published the day OS X and iOS 8 go live for consumers.
Developers interested in Swift can download the Xcode 6 beta today, and we’ve included links to that download in addition to a guide and the Swift Programming Language book in the iBooks Store below.
