| Chris Lattner talked about some of these issues on the Accidental Tech Podcast a few weeks ago: http://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript/ It was a great episode and is worth the listen for those interested. On Swift adoption at Apple: "The Swift team itself has specific goals they need to achieve before there can be truly, across-the-board adoption at Apple. ABI stability is the number-one thing [35:30] that prevents framework developers, for example, from adopting Swift. That's a really important thing. That's one of the reasons it's always a really high priority. Swift has been adopted by application developers and other things. The Dock is public. Swift Playgrounds app is public. The Music app in iOS is publicly known. So there are definitely some big adopters. More broadly though, the big problem is that I think, I won't speak for everybody but many, many people doing [36:00] Objective-C development at Apple are chomping at the bit. They want to be using Swift. It's really just a matter of getting the technology problems solved and checking off the things that are holding people back. It's not about people dragging their feet and not wanting to use it." On whether to adopt Swift now: "I don't [1:14:30] think Objective-C is going to go away anytime soon. Apple still supports C and C++ and there's no obvious benefit of dropping Objective-C, and obviously they have a ton of Objective-C code themselves." He also described Apple's approach to some of the strategic questions that arose early on, such as whether to just invest in making Objective-C better instead of introducing Swift, and the various trade-offs involved. |