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Comment by blumomo | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see Swift for Android programing. I'm already using Kotlin, a language very close to Swift, for programming our Android apps. But I find Swift niftier than Kotlin.

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In what way? I've recently started writing in Swift and I find it to be less powerful than Kotlin. One such feature that's missing: extension expressions. Allows things like `let` and `with` from the kotlin stdlib

What exactly are extension expressions, do you mean extension methods? If so, Swift does support them. I actually miss interface extensions in Kotlin, but thats a java cross compatibility issue.

look at the signature for `with`

    inline fun <T, R> with(receiver: T, f: T.() -> R): R

it takes a lambda that is scoped to the receiver type `T`. This means the lambda runs in the scope of whatever is passed in as a receiver.

    with(list) {
      add(item)
      add(item)
    }

This essentially lets you create DSLs for whatever.

Another thing that's bit me in butt recently is that `Protocol`s aren't concrete types, unlike an `interface` in Java/Kotlin.

If you want Swift on Android, have a look at Eclipse Xtend: http://futurice.com/blog/android-development-has-its-own-swi...

http://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/silver/ free one here

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