Swift – Rob Fahrni

A wonderful bouquet of flowers. I was just reading a Slack channel I’m a part of and someone was asking if it’s difficult to add Swift to an Objective-C project. It’s not. Basically you should add a bridging header to your project so you can call your Objective-C code from Swift then do a full nullability audit on any code you’d like to call from Swift. That’s it in a nutshell as far as I can remember.

Another thing to keep in mind as you start writing Swift. Just start writing code. It doesn’t matter if it’s “swifty” or not. I’m an old C/C++ developer and people probably think my Objective-C and Swift look like an old C/C++ developer wrote it. Sure, there are nice things in the language you’ll learn to take advantage of but, to get started, just write code.

I’ve been working in Swift more and more over the past couple months. To get started I wrote a simple parsing class for Agrian, the product I work on. More recently, as in this week, we started doing most work in Swift. The syntax is super sugary and will take some getting used to, but I can already see I’m going to love working in it.

It seems if you have a background in C, C++, or C#, you should feel right at home. I wonder how JavaScript developers feel about it? If you have an opinion feel free to leave a comment, or write about it on your weblog. I’m curious what you have to say.

This afternoon as I was working on the app I found myself wishing I could do something like this with Swift.

let textView = UITextView() {
    .userInteractionEnabled = false
    .font = .defaultFont(14)
    .backgroundColor = .yellowColor()
}

It feels like a natural thing to do, I don’t know why, but it does. We’re working in Swift 2.0, so if there is a way to do this, please let me know, I don’t think we can, but I’m such a noob, I’m not sure about much.