Apple unveils Swift programming language Swift, akin to Objective-C but without the baggage, emphasizes speed and interactivity for building OS X and iOS apps
Apple has a new programming language, Swift, intended to provide modern programming capabilities for Apple application development and streamline the building of applications. Featured as part of the Xcode 6 IDE (now in a beta release) and introduced this morning, Swift is a language for the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks for OS X and iOS. "Swift is fast, it is modern, it is designed for safety, and it enables a level of interactivity and development that you've never seen before on the platform," said Greg Federighi, Apple senior vice president for software engineering, in introducing Swift at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco. The concept behind Swift involves developing a language like Apple's favored Objective-C language but without the baggage of C, Federighi said. Swift features such capabilities as closures, generics, multiple return types, and namespaces, and Swift code can fit alongside Objective-C and C code.