It was a pretty big surprise all round when Swift was announced at WWDC on Monday. Very exciting news. It can work alongside Objective-C! It also has a bunch of cool features that I’ve missed since transitioning over to Objective-C. Generics are probably the biggest thing for me - after using C# for so long I wasn’t sure I would be able to handle not having them (I obviously did learn to not have them). Now that they’re back, and with only one day of Swift usage, I already feel like I’m back with an old friend. Another thing I’ve missed: single file classes! How frustrating it is to deal with separate header/implementation files.

I spent all of yesterday reading the Swift manual, playing with the new playground feature in Xcode (which is awesome, by the way), and generally getting used to the language. In the evening I set up a very small app that uses a table view. I’ve already seen a bunch of other people post the same sort of thing already, and I find no gain in posting my own as well, so go do a Google search if you want to see how that works. I also spent a couple of hours re-implementing some old LINQ favourites (that don’t already exist in the Swift standard library)

Given that it’s a new language on a platform filled with developers, popularity is already booming - I believe one of the WWDC videos mentioned over 350,000 downloads of the Swift iBooks manual. Still, in the coming weeks/months, I’m going to write about things that may have caught me out with the language, things I find interesting, or just general tidbits that could be useful.