Nate Swanner, writing for The Next Web:
About the time Swift was going open source, representatives for three major brands — Google, Facebook and Uber — were at a meeting in London discussing the new language. Sources tell The Next Web that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language for Android, while Facebook and Uber are also looking to make Swift more central to their operations.
Google’s Android operating system currently supports Java as its first-class language, and sources say Swift is not meant to replace Java, at least initially. While the ongoing litigation with Oracle is likely cause for concern, sources say Google considers Swift to have a broader “upside” than Java.
This is a fantastic development (sorry!). Imagine being able to write some core code in Swift and have it serve as part of both an iOS and Android project. Obviously, the interface frameworks will never be the same, but there’s plenty of code that doesn’t depend on a particular operating system. I love this idea.
[H/T Satyender Mahajan]
Interestingly, no mention whatsoever of Go or Dart in that article.
The potential to displace Java alone would make me as a developer hope it happens sooner or later. Alas, I’m not a developer. As a user, I would drop Java in a New York minute if I could. Problem is, too many developers don’t care about security and functionality it would seem.
I have spent a significant amount of time coding in either Go or Swift over the last 18 months, I still like both but Swift definitely seems to have more momentum and increasing support on non-iOS platforms.
Hmm… remember when Google embraced Webkit? That worked out well in the end.
You can already write once/run across Android and iOS thanks to Xamarin (C#)…
and others. but thats a crappy solution — non-native frameworks are always a crappier solution.
just because one can…
I think that IBM having such a heavy influence on server side Swift will slow down adoption. For example, if I’m building services in Java I would use Dropwizard or Springboot, not an IBM or Oracle stack. It’s not that I don’t think that the open source community will eventually come up with a better model for Swift (libraries and devops approaches) but it will just slow things down.
Amazingly Google hasn’t managed to muck up the golang ecosystem but it’s been designed for systems side work and they don’t care about building an “enterprise grade stack” that they can sell to customers.
So, three years from now, will Android die-hards claim they invented Swift, too?
This is great news for me! Though I’m not sure if I want to open the garden to the Toxic Hellstew™ Of fragmentation.. Maybe start with some incredibly basic apps. Maybe.