I recently watched the WWDC ’16 Session “Swift 3 API Design Guidelines” and I’m amazed about about apples direction with Swift.
I started playing around with Swift when it was announced at WWDC 14, and since then lot’s of things have changed. Swift, which is now open source, is constantly evolving and version 3 brings major changes.
The API Design Guidelines are still under development, but they’re worth studying. I love clear and focused code that can be read like a story.
Apple also announced, that the whole swift standard API is being reviewed to conform the API design guidelines.
Most current API’s like Cocoa which were originally developed for Objective C. Working with this API’s in swift feels somehow awkward. The necessary changes to migrate existing code bases will be high, but XCode will support it with “Fix-It’s”.
This is a huge announcement, and it shows again, that apple pushes developers towards the Swift language.
The “Elephant” (the C libraries) will be ported to swift too. Instead of using the global “stringly” typed functions with awkward parameter labels, we’ll be able to use well designed and strongly types swift classes.
Interested in more details? Have a look here.