Being able to use Swift will be a huge benefit! It lowers the bar for volunteer contribution - Obj-C is pretty tough to wrap your mind around as a beginner. Obj-C code also ends up being *much* more bloated than Swift code, making it even harder for volunteer contributors to grok our Obj-C code base.
Being much more concise and generally less clunky than Obj-C is great, but Swift also has baked-in protection against entire classes of errors common to Obj-C, and TONS of time saving and powerful modern language features. So, yes, Swift a.s.a.p. please! On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 3:21 AM, Joaquin Oltra Hernandez < jhernan...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Swift is a very interesting language, should be exciting! > > On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 7:05 AM, Dan Garry <dga...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > >> *tl;dr: The programming language used to develop new features by our iOS >> app engineering team is changing from Objective C to Swift at some point in >> the near future.* >> >> When making a native app, the language you have to implement the app in >> is chosen by the third party responsible for the platform. For iOS apps, >> Apple chose Objective C to be the language the app is written in. Objective >> C is a... very strange language. It has a lot of quirks that slow down >> development. >> >> To solve the above problem, you can now write apps in a new language >> called Swift. Notably, Swift has features that make it less error prone and >> more concise than Objective C, which should increase our velocity of >> feature development. Swift is also much more readable and in-line with >> other languages, which lowers the barrier of entry (which is currently very >> high with Objective C). >> >> Importantly, Objective C and Swift can live alongside each other. So, >> when we "switch to Swift" we do not need to rewrite all of our existing >> code from Objective C to Swift. Instead, we can just start developing new >> features using Swift, and slowly rewrite the old code from Objective C into >> Swift as time allows. >> >> On the downsides, Swift is only supported on iOS 7 and above. iOS 6 only >> represents around 5% of our user base, and we can pin iOS 6 users to the >> last version of the app we released before we used Swift. We need to decide >> what the last set of features we're want in that build are before we switch. >> >> Here are our next steps: >> >> - Evaluate more concretely whether Swift actually fits our needs or >> not. [Engineering] >> - Decide last set of features for our iOS 6 build. [Product/Design] >> >> Thanks, >> Dan >> >> -- >> Dan Garry >> Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps >> Wikimedia Foundation >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Mobile-l mailing list >> Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > Mobile-l mailing list > Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l > >
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