Decrypt the new Apple programming language Swift

Chris Ratner, creator of Swift

Netease Technology News June 5, according to foreign media reports, Apple's new programming language Swift, from the beginning of research and development to the final release only took less than 4 years. The creator behind the language, Chris Lattner, director of tools for Apple's developer tools, based on his blog post, said that most of Swift's underlying architecture was developed by one person, and only a handful of internal People know about this project.

Swift language development started from July 2010, but it did not receive the attention of Apple Developer Tools until 2013. Ratner said most of the early architecture development was done by him alone, but by the end of 2011 some very good engineers started to contribute to the project, which made Swift gain departmental attention.

Like other programming languages, Swift benefits from hard-won development experiences in other languages. Xcode Playgrounds feature is Latina's favorite, but also Swift for Apple's development tools bring the greatest innovation. This feature provides incredible interactive effects that allow Swift code to be compiled and displayed in real time as you write.

Ratner emphasizes that the functionality of Playgrounds is largely inspired by the Bret Victor philosophy, through the writing desk, and other interactive systems. And programming became more popular and fun, Ratner said it would help Apple to attract the next generation of programmers, and even allow universities to reform the course content of computer science.

Ratner's ambitious goal was endorsed by Craig Federighi, vice president of software engineering at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The latter conveyed Apple's ambition to all developers in its keynote address - bringing the company's best-of-breed practicality to its software development tools.

"When the Swift debuted, the audience exclaimed and was shocked," said Richard Reilly, VentureBeat contributing writer. But after being amazed, developers immediately showed their interest in Swift. Only one day after the release, e-books about the language were downloaded more than 370,000 times.

Latina joined Apple in 2005, joking through his blog that Swift will celebrate its fourth birthday next month. (Lu Xin)