Will fast-growing swift eliminate objective-c?

Just pull up a fruit powder and say Apple Watch is the first of its kind in a year, and then it's the iphone's sales record and Apple's $3 billion takeover of Beats Electronics, and well-informed people might mention Apple Car. The same problem is in front of the iOS developers, last year Apple launched a new generation of programming language, a lot of hardcore fruit powder has long been heard of Swift must be ranked in the leaderboard.

Today, though, several hours after the opening of the 2015 Apple Global Developer Conference (WWDC 2015), many developers have lined up outside the Moscone West venue in San Francisco to wait for admission. On this year's WWDC, there will be 8 hours of swift lab time per day, and the team of Apple engineers will teach Swift's usage and answer the questions developers encounter in Swift development, while 4 presentations will be devoted to the swift topic, when Swift will be a hot spot for many attendees to discuss.

A year ago, WWDC, senior vice president of Apple Software Engineering, was unveiled by Craig Federighi for Swift, demonstrating features such as type inference, closures, and multiple namespaces. The developers held their breath and burst into a warm applause. He also joked: "A lot of people do not believe swift how good, but also say ' those people are talking about what ah ' words."

Just 7 months after its release, Swift has become the 22nd most popular programming language in the Red Monk programming language rankings and is likely to replace objective-c in the future, ranking up to 3rd place. The TIOBE June 2015 programming language rankings show that Objective-c has entered "free fall" and Swift continues to rise.

Similarly, in a survey of 26,086 developers in 157 countries, the stack Overflow (Developer Quiz site) found that the swift language was most popular with developers and topped the list with a 76.6% per cent high.

In terms of the breadth of the push, Java, introduced in 1995, was the most successful programming language before Swift. Although Swift is limited to iOS devices, it will have 1.5 billion iOS devices by 2017, with an almost 50% increase over today's more than 1 billion units. In the big picture, Swift's achievement of the next success story may only be a matter of time.

Many universities and training institutions have started to offer swift courses based on market demand. "Swift's response is unusually enthusiastic and developers flock to it," said Ray Wenderlich, a famous iOS developer. "So shortly after Swift's launch, he shifted the focus of the course to the new language.

How can many developers be indifferent to the power of Swift? While the iOS app's programming language is Apple's call, developers are willing to follow it, and they know that iOS users are four times times more profitable than Android users, so how swift itself is no longer the most important factor.

Prior to Swift, the objective-c was the only iOS application programming language introduced in the 80 's. But now that objective-c is a bit outdated, developers are even using "old", "tedious", "nauseam" to describe it. Of course, as long as the popular language, always attract mixed evaluation. In fact, many developers do not dare to comment, for fear that the point of inappropriate words will be exposed in hacker news.

Peter Morelli, vice president of engineering at the taxi application Lyft, was asked if the objective-c language was too difficult to answer, but said: "It's like a religious war, a scene where developers are busy." ”

Why does swift provoke such a warm response? As we all know, the differences between different programming languages are long story, and in a few words, Swift is safe (there are few loopholes in the code), but also embodies some new features, like other mainstream languages can add a variety of additional features for the application.

Another important advantage is that developers have what they need to be able to easily express themselves to the computer using Swift. With the same effect, it may take several lines of code to use OBJECTIVE-C, but Swift is much simpler. "Look at these zigzag codes and semicolons, and with objective-c, it will be four times times the length of swift," said Myers Carpenter, a developer at the Technology course services company Treehouse.

6 months ago, Lyft arranged for the engineer to experiment with Swift and decided to rewrite the Lyft application with Swift, which is expected to be completed by July. The length of code written with Swift is only 1/5, and the time it takes to repeat and update code is "reduced from a long months to just a few days," Morelli said. "This is the biggest advantage of Swift." ”

LinkedIn's file sharing service SlideShare is also one of the early swift applications. The company's developers said the transition to Swift was very successful, but they also paid the price of growth. For example, the 13-inch MacBook Pro has no processing power to handle programs that convert swift into a computer-readable format. SlideShare's software engineer, Kyle Sherman, wrote on LinkedIn's engineering blog: "It's a lot better for colleagues to use a computer with 15-inch i7s four-core processors." However, fans are still enthusiastic about swift. ”

This kind of problem will be solved when swift matures. Swift updates are too fast, unstable, and a hindrance to promotion, so many developers are more willing to wait a while. Colin Eberhardt, technical director of Scott Logic software development, says Swift's frequent updates have forced him to adjust his code frequently. He said: "Do the product code, certainly do not want to use Swift." "Apple is not yet willing to respond to this question.

So far objective-c is still more widely used than swift, but it is not impossible to replace the former if Swift continues to evolve. Once swift stabilizes and matures, Apple may choose to leave only one, setting swift as the only programming language for iOS apps. It may not be a step in the next few years, but Wenderlich says: "Developers are likely to switch to Swift, when Objective-c will be out of sight." ”

Will fast-growing swift eliminate objective-c?