While Apple has promoted the Swift programming language to third-party developers for their apps, it hasn’t done much in the way of using it for their own home-cooking. Apple senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi says that’s changing.
The iCloud team has been “completely champing at the bit to be able to apply it in many, many of the things they do,” the executive told Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. More importantly Federighi noted that the team that does Dock and window management for OS X implemented of all of its El Capitan features in Swift, and has worked on mass-converting its code.
The group said “they couldn’t imagine going back and that they’re more productive with it,” according to Federighi.
Federighi admitted there had been some issues with Apple’s development teams using prerelease versions of the language, but says that now Swift 2.0 is available in a finished version, code development is more stable than ever.
Federighi also shared some of the reasoning behind Apple’s taking the language open-source earlier this month, saying the move was Apple wants Swift to be the main language programmers are taught. He says the company believes the language could potentially be “the major language for the next 20 years of programming in our industry,” and noted that it is already the most active language on Github.
