Developers reflect on a year of learning, teaching, and using Apple’s Swift
Apple first announced the Swift programming language at WWDC 2014, albeit in beta form. It was released alongside an extensive iBooks manual, and it was later discovered that Apple coded the WWDC app for that year’s conference in Swift without telling anyone. Sneaky.
Swift 1.0, the first non-beta version of the language, was released in September alongside iOS 8.0. Version 1.1 arrived a month later with OS X Yosemite, and version 1.2 came out in February. Each of these language tweaks was accompanied by an update for Xcode, and Apple has been working to improve the general speed and stability of Swift and Xcode itself throughout it all.
Now that the language has been around in one form or another for about a year, we checked in with a wide swath of iOS and OS X developers to see just how things were progressing. Are there any other things about Swift that haven’t quite caught up to Objective-C? Are Apple’s promised improvements panning out? And what kind of things do developers want for future versions of Swift?
