swift ?

dust's picture

Anybody care to comment on swift ? Is it too soon ? Seems to have similarities in syntax to a few other languages like, C, java script in particular stands out, but also reminds me of fortran, java, and C sharp. The interoperability and mixed programming seems useful. I am a bit skeptical about the migrating of projects. More importantly what does this mean for quartz composer, open cl, and open gl contexts. Is this really going to speed up our environment. As it is maverick is a bit sluggish for me now and thinking of rolling back. I would rather keep rolling forward, it's just hard for me to keep up with at the moment. I'm still haven't gone through all the dev examples from last years conference.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: swift ?

QC and Graphics Tools are in the Yosemite beta download.

As far as Swift goes, seems like the jury will be out for a long time.

If you can "go lower level" easily…like call a Swift Sprite, and then load a shader to it, or load an arbitrary model, for example, it would seem to have the needed flexibility for what "people like us" desire.

If it's just loading sprites and putting png graphics, like what seems to appear in the output window for the Swift blurb, it may still be useful, just less so. Conceptually, it reminds me a lot of Processing. Which may be a reason a couple years ago that Apple had some job listings for people familiar with Processing (or maybe not).

I would doubt it would speed things up, but you never know. Maybe they're also looking at it as an improvement to Core Animation type concepts, especially since the guy that wrote that stuff is no longer at Apple.

dust's picture
Re: swift ?

It does seem like processing, and I can see how it it's enumerations and key value pairs seem like core animation. So textually it seems as simple as it can get without getting too pseudo. At what point will this high level written language be integrated into a visual programming paradigm for iOS and does the mean the system creates a unity between the two platforms ? Like iOS run on Mac and vice versa ?