Apple formed a working group to support the Android platform in the SWIFT programming language, as well as to promote SWIFT as a language for developing mobile Android applications. Android will now be officially supported in SWIFT.
The main tasks that the working group will tackle include:
- Improving and supporting Android in the official SWIFT tools without the need for third-party patches.
- Expanding basic packages like foundation and dispatch for better support of Android application development approaches.
- Working with the existing platform support group to determine support levels for Android and gradually implement them.
- Determining the supported Android API range and integrating them with SWIFT.
- Creating a continuous integration mechanism for checking Android changes in SWIFT.
- Developing recommendations for SWIFT and Android Java SDK interaction, as well as distributing SWIFT library for Android.
- Building tools for debugging SWIFT applications for Android and assisting in adding Android support to community-developed SWIFT packages.
SWIFT combines elements of C and Objective-C, providing an object model compatible with Objective-C. SWIFT code can be mixed with Objective-C but offers enhanced safety features like automatic memory management, controlled array overflow, and memory protection, increasing code reliability. SWIFT also supports modern programming methods such as closures, generics, lambda expressions, and more.
To ensure high performance, SWIFT programs compile to machine code through LLVM technologies, outperforming Objective-C by 30% in performance tests. SWIFT utilizes reference counting instead of a garbage collector for memory management. The language comes with a package manager known as swift package manager for module and package distribution, automated loading, building, and dependency management.
The compiler and tools for SWIFT language are distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.