Swift, akin to Objective-C but without the baggage, emphasizes speed and interactivity for building OS X and iOS apps Apple has a new programming language, Swift, intended to provide modern programming capabilities for Apple application development and streamline the building of applications.Featured as part of the Xcode 6 IDE (now in a beta release) and introduced this morning, Swift is a language for the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks for OS X and iOS.“Swift is fast, it is modern, it is designed for safety, and it enables a level of interactivity and development that you’ve never seen before on the platform,” said Greg Federighi, Apple senior vice president for software engineering, in introducing Swift at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco. The concept behind Swift involves developing a language like Apple’s favored Objective-C language but without the baggage of C, Federighi said. Swift features such capabilities as closures, generics, multiple return types, and namespaces, and Swift code can fit alongside Objective-C and C code. “Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast,” Apple documentation states. “Swift is ready for your next iOS and OS X project — or for addition into your current app — because Swift code works side by side with Objective-C.” Swift, Apple said, resulted from the latest research on programming languages combined with experience building Apple platforms. The language uses the LLVM compiler, with Swift code transformed into native code. Named parameters brought from Objective-C are expressed in a clean syntax, making APIs in Swift “even easier to read and maintain,” Apple said. Inferred types lead to cleaner, less mistake-prone code, modules eliminate headers and provide namespaces, and automatic memory management is featured.Developers can use Swift code immediately to implement new application features or enhance existing features. When iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite — new OS releases also detailed today — are released this fall, developers can submit apps using Swift to the App Store and Mac App Store. Tutorials for using Swift are included in the Xcode beta release. Apple’s new language is a “big deal,” said analyst Frank Gillett, of Forrester. “It promises to make it easier, more accessible, and faster to develop secure and compelling apps.”This story, “Apple unveils Swift programming language,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter. Related content news ActiveState's Python taps Intel MKL to speed data science and machine learning The MKL libraries for accelerating math operations debuted in Intel's own Python distribution, but now other Pythons are following suit By Serdar Yegulalp May 18, 2017 3 mins Data Science Machine Learning Open Source news CrateDB 2.0 Enterprise stresses security and monitoring—and open source The open source database for processing high-speed freeform data with SQL queries now has enterprise features, available as open source for faster developer uptake By Serdar Yegulalp May 16, 2017 3 mins NoSQL Databases Technology Industry Databases news analysis Waah! WannaCry shifts the blame game into high gear Every security crisis presents the opportunity to point fingers, but that's just wasted energy. The criminals are at fault—and we need to work together to stop them By Fahmida Rashid May 16, 2017 7 mins Small and Medium Business Technology Industry Malware news Faster machine learning is coming to the Linux kernel The addition of heterogenous memory management to the Linux kernel will unlock new ways to speed up GPUs, and potentially other kinds of machine learning hardware By Serdar Yegulalp May 15, 2017 3 mins Technology Industry Machine Learning Open Source Resources Videos