Last year at the Apple WorldWide Developer Conference (WWDC), Apple introduced its own programming language for iOS and OS X — Swift. The language is designed not only to make it easier for developers to program for Apple’s platforms, but also work hand-in-hand with Objective-C, the existing programming language of choice for many devs. Yesterday, Apple released version 1.2 of Swift as part of the Xcode 6.3 beta.
The big deal is that the compiler used by Swift has been significantly enhanced, with more stability and much better performance. Developers can now do incremental builds, so source files that have not been changed don’t need to be re-compiled. That shortens the amount of time it takes to make a build.
Executables now run faster, meaning that the apps users receive that are debugged and released using Swift should have better performance. For developers, compiler diagnostics have improved and include clearer error and warning messages — that resolves a common gripe of early adopters of Swift.
Apple also fixed the “most common compiler crashes,” which should cause developers using Swift to smile. Additional details about the beta release of Xcode 6.3 and Swift 1.2 are available in the link above.
If you’re an Apple World Today reader who wants to learn Apple’s programming language, Stanford University has made the first two lectures from its “Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift” class available for free on iTunes U. Other Swift programming resources are available from Apple here.
