Adopting Swift

One of the biggest news coming out of WWDC 2014 for Apple developers was the introduction of a new programming language — Swift. Like many curious developers out there, I downloaded the book, viewed Swift-related session videos, and tried Playground in XCode. After evaluation, developers will have to make the decision — adopt this new language or not. Actually, the decision may become when to adopt this new language. Objective-C is not going anywhere in the mean time due to the sheer amount of existing code. However, Apple clearly has positioned Swift as a modern language for now and the future.

For that reason, I have decided to migrate my app Cinema Trivia from Objective-C to Swift at earliest convenience. The decision was not that difficult to make. Cinema Trivia has only several thousand lines of code so it does not take a tremendous effort to rewrite the whole thing in another language. Developers who maintain large Objective-C code obviously have to take the interoperability approach — Swift code and Objective-C code can peacefully co-exist in the same project. I, on the other hand, have the luxury of going full Swift due to the size of legacy code.

It will be interesting to observe the future of both Swift and Objective-C.