Swift, a programming language for distributed parallel scripting (if you’re a developer, you know what I’m talking about), can now be used to develop apps for both iOS and OS X, Apple announced during today’s keynote at its five-day WWDC developer-only show in San Francisco.


Built with the speediest LLVM compiler, Swift is native, supports Cocoa and CocoaTouch development (so both iOS and OS X development is possible), has complete Xcode support and produces the same runtime code as he much more complicated Objective-C.

Apple Swift (image 001)

What’s best, developers don’t need to choose between C for Mac development and Objective-C for iOS development because Swift supports both iOS and OS X and can co-exist with C and Objective-C code.

Apple Swift (image 002)

Why would anyone develop with Swift?

Because it’s simpler than Objective-C yet as powerful – if not more. Also, Swift allows developers to create as complex apps as in Objective-C, but with fewer lines of code. But most importantly, Swift is really optimized for speed.

Here’s a side-by-side example of an example RC4 encryption code produced in C, Objective-C and Swift.

Apple Swift (image 003)

Another example follows below.

Apple Swift (image 004)

The speed gains alone should prompt developers to consider switching to Swift. And for would-be developers who are new to the platform, Swift is tempting due to its far less steeper learning curve.

What’s more, the complete Swift guide is available as a downloadable iBooks document. And when iOS 8 launches this Fall, developers will be able to submit apps created with Swift from day one.