Appendix A
The Swift Programming Language
Swift is Apple’s new programming language intended to be the future replacement of Objective-C for Mac and iOS development. Some people are referring to it as a functional programming language, but it is actually an object-oriented programming language with a healthy dose of generic programming.
One of the most important facts about Swift is that it uses the same LLVM compiler and runtime as Objective-C, which means Swift and Objective-C code can live side-by-side. It also has access to all of the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch features you have in Objective-C applications.
Here are some notable features of Swift:
- Closures (similar to Objective-C blocks)
- Tuples that return values
- Generics
- Fast iterators
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