"Reprint" Google brewing apple Swift as the main development language of Android app

TNW Chinese station April 8 report

The software development language of the Android operating system is Java, and over the last few years there has been a long-standing lawsuit between Google (Weibo) and Oracle over copyright in Java. Google is considering Swift as the "first-tier" language for future Android software development, and companies such as Facebook and Uber are starting to pay more attention to Swift's use, according to the latest foreign media news.

TheNextWeb, a US-based technology news website, quoted a person familiar with the situation as saying that Apple Swift turned into an open source language, while representatives of Google, Facebook and Uber's three companies met in London to discuss the Swift language Google has decided to gradually adopt this language in Android.

Java is currently the most important language for Android development. At least in the early stages, the swift language will not replace the importance of Java, sources say. The current lawsuit between Google and Oracle about Java is still on the rise, prompting concerns about Google's belief that Swift and Java have a broad advantage over it.

Swift is currently an open source language, which means that Google can apply it to Android software development without changing the Android's Open source mobile architecture.

Will Google do this?

Swift was developed by Apple to replace the old development language objective C. Swift was soon welcomed by Apple's developers, who said software code was easier to write and had no complex parametric structure in other languages.

The Swift language was released at the 2014 Apple Global Development Conference and was supported by a number of technology companies, such as IBM, chauffeur-drive company Lyft, Vimio, Pixelmator, and others using the swift language to develop their iOS software.

However, Swift cannot easily go to "copy sticky" to other operating systems, if Google is to use it as an Android language, Google must first develop a swift "runtime Library", which is only the first step.

Google is also porting the entire Android application development library to Swift, as well as a variety of software development structures and development packages that support the Swift language. It is said that the current development interface in Android is written in C + +, and Swift cannot be easily compatible, so Google may want to rewrite the code that writes these interfaces.

In addition to the use of Java Advanced Development interface, the Swift language will also have trouble, Google needs to do some rewriting code work.

However, it is technically not impossible to use Swift as the main development language for Android. By the end of last year, Romain Goyet, a well-known software developer, had experimented with Swift to develop Android software and had been successful. His experiment occurred before Apple took Swift to open source, but it also proved that Swift could be used for Android software development.

It is reported that the above experiment using the "Android NDK" tool, this tool also enables other development languages to apply to Android development. However, since Swift has been transformed into an open source language, and there is Google's support behind it, developers may no longer need this tool if they are the dominant development language for Android in the future.

In general, if you use the Swift language, Google may want to re-work around Java.

Kotlin language

The source also revealed that Google has also discussed whether to use another language Kotlin as a first-class language for Android development.

Like Swift, Kotlin is an object-oriented language that pays more attention to the security of the software. Unlike Swift, however, Kotlin is able to do so in Google's Android development tool, "the Studio".

However, the source said that the Google-related team currently think Kotlin language in the compilation, the speed is somewhat slow.

Kotlin languages are considered to be able to be used in any Java-language environment, and other development projects can seamlessly support mixed use of Kotlin languages and Java.

If Google Kotlin language as the main language for Android, Google will need to do a relatively small number of transplants, but developers may face a difficult transition.

Facebook and Uber

Because of some of the technical advantages of SWIFT, Facebook has begun to focus on this language. One of the advantages of Swift is the ability to be a language for both background development and front-end development. For social networking products like Facebook, this feature is helpful. For example, mobile applications and services can communicate seamlessly, and Facebook can also make it easier to launch a variety of service development interfaces.

Facebook has started using swift for development. A project called "Port to Android" was recently developed on GitHub, the Open source project storage service, by Facebook employees. But it's unclear whether it's official Facebook development. But it can be confirmed that the swift language is already in use within Facebook and is not known to the outside world.

Uber uses the swift language to be more clear than Google or Facebook. Uber also has a large number of service-side, development interfaces, and so on, but rival Lyft uses Swift to provide Uber with a reference role.

　　

When will Swift be adopted?

In the short term, however, Swift is not the dominant language for Android, largely because the Android operating system needs to do a lot of prep work.

However, the swift language is catching fire. Some studies have shown that Swift has become the world's fastest-growing language for programming, and in addition to open source, there has been a rocket-type explosion. GitHub disclosed that Swift's popularity ranked 11th place on its platform.

In addition, market demand for swift developers is growing rapidly, at least indicating that some technology companies are exploring the development of software with Swift.

However, Google's Android operating system has a long way to use Swift, and it needs to rewrite every system service, software and development interface for Android. Google also has to provide a lot of support work.

In addition, Google has actually left the Oracle-dominated Java language, Google is already using Android's "Open JDK", rather than Oracle has a copyright Java API, in addition to Google also began to consider "post-Java" some problems.

This article is reproduced from http://tech.qq.com/a/20160408/010216.htm

"Reprint" Google brewing apple Swift as the main development language of Android app