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Earlier this week, Apple unveiled a new programming language called Swift at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). Now the language’s creator, Chris Lattner, has revealed some more details about Swift’s development.
Lattner, who also developed the LLVM compiler, began working on Swift during the summer of 2010, along with “a few other (amazing) people.” The project became “major focus for the Apple Developer Tools group” in 2013. Lattner writes that Swift draws “ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list.” He adds that Swift “combines the best in modern language thinking with wisdom from the wider Apple engineering culture. The compiler is optimized for performance, and the language is optimized for development, without compromising on either.”
