Swift: Uncharted Territory

Some introductory concepts lead to some in-depth discoveries about Swift.

Video: http://www.realm.io/2014/06/17/swift-unchartered-territory-swift-intro-and-internals/

Transcript

1. SWIFT UNCHARTED TERRITORY
2. CHRIS LATTNER
3. CHRIS LATTNER LLVM
4. CHRIS LATTNER LLVM SWIFT
5. CHRIS LATTNER LLVM SWIFT ! HANDSOME
6. STUCK WITH ME JP Simard @simjp realm.io
7. THIS TALK 1. Early, incomplete version of a language? 2. Buggy, pre-release compiler, IDE, OS? 3. Unreleased beta of presentation app? 4. Presenter who doesn't fully understand the language?
8. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
9. WHY SWIFT > OBJC? ▸ Type safety & inference ▸ Closures ▸ Tuples ▸ Super-Enums ▸ Functional programming ▸ Generics
10. Q: WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?
11. TYPE SAFETY & INFERENCE LIKE RUST & SCALA
12. CLOSURES SWIFT CLOSURES ! OBJC BLOCKS
13. TUPLES LIKE HASKELL & SCALA
14. SUPER-ENUMS* *OK, NOT EXACTLY THE CORRECT TECHNICAL TERM
15. FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING LIKE HASKELL, SCALA & MANY OTHERS
16. GENERICS LIKE... UH... EVERY MODERN LANGUAGE!
17. Q: WHAT HAPPENED TO MY BELOVED *
18. ▸ concepts are still there: reference types and value types ▸ pointers still exist to interact with C APIs: UnsafePointer<T> ▸ C APIs are still usable:
19. DEMO #1
20. Q: HOW DOES IT ALL WORK?
21. A: it barely does !
22. SERIOUSLY, HOW DOES IT WORK? ▸ Swift objects are actually Objective-C objects* ▸ *Without any methods or properties... strange! ▸ Just like C++, Swift methods are listed in a vtable ▸ Swift properties are ivars with Swift methods ▸ ivars have no type encoding!!! ivar_getTypeEncoding(); // always NULL
23. DEMO #2
24. XCODE & TOOLS INTEGRATION ▸ Clang knows absolutely nothing about Swift ▸ Swift compiler talks to clang through XPC /Applications/Xcode6-Beta.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/ usr/bin
25. DEMO #3
26. JAZZY
     GITHUB.COM/REALM/JAZZY A SOULFUL WAY TO GENERATE DOCS FOR SWIFT & OBJECTIVE-C
27. LINKS () ▸ Official Swift website ▸ The Swift Programming Language Book ▸ WWDC Videos ▸ WWDC Sample Code ▸ Xcode 6 (and other resources) Apple Developer Account Required
28. LINKS (!) ▸ This talk: github.com/jpsim/talks ▸ Jay Freeman's AltConf talk: debugging your (Swift) apps with cycript ▸ ObjC/Swift doc generator: github.com/realm/jazzy ▸ Evan Swick: Inside Swift ▸ Swift on StackOverflow
29. THANK YOU!
30. Meetup().questions?.askThem! JP SIMARD, @SIMJP, REALM.IO