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Comment by kunstmord | Hacker News Reader

Oh God, they just compared the speed of Objective C, Swift and... Python! It's nice to see Swift being faster than Objective C, etc., but what has Python got to do with coding native iOS/OS X apps? Of course it's going to fail at speed when compared to a static compiled language.

What a weird and pointless comparison, imo (I mean the inclusion of Python, seems so random to me).

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It's neither weird nor pointless. They're going for something that is as comfortable to work with as modern dynamic languages, for something that eschews the cruft of ObjC. Python is simply a very popular representative for this type of language.

Of course, it's an easy target. But I can see why they went for it.

Yeah, I kind of get it after some additional thought (and reading through the replies). Maybe I missed out on some detail (not watching the live video, just a text stream) – now that I've taken a look at the syntax, the comparison seems more valid. Still, comparing this to Javascript would've been more interesting (webapps, all that stuff).

Apple pushed the speed of Javascript in the newest version of Safari, earlier in the keynote. They probably try not to complete with themselves.

I can see a reason: it's gunning for the mindshare of the kind of developers who like the features in Python. But you're right that performing faster than Objective-C tells you what you need to know, and showing the Python comparison first was just showmanship.

I would have been interested in a JavaScript comparison, which I'm sure we'll be seeing from third parties soon.

Swift looks a lot like a scripting/dynamic programming language. For e.g. this is a complete Swift program:

    println("Hello")

I think the idea was that Swift will be as easy to code as Python and faster than Objective-C.

Dynamic has nothing to do with it. printfn "Hello" is a complete program in F#, too.

There's no reason C#, Java, etc. can't have such things exposed, but they get so wrapped up in their boilerplate and OO overhead they choose not to.

I mean the inclusion of Python, seems so random to me

It's supposed to be a "mainstream" scripting language. Also, it's an easy way for them to get favorable numbers for their presentation.

On the Ars liveblog, I didn't see any mention of Swift support for other platforms. Are we going to see Swift on Linux and Windows as well?

I didn't either, but if not, my bet is that outside programmers will make an open source version (like Mono to C#).

According to one Apple developer who works on the project it will _likely_ be open sourced, though the developer says they don't know if that's true or not:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=363...

Could you post the message (or thread) somewhere? I think that post is paywalled.

Sure, sorry - I'm not sure which SA threads are free and which require payment. This is the relevant bit:

"Is this under NDA?

No.

Is this open source?

Not yet. It probably will be, but I can't make promises. Right now, our repository still has a lot of history that we don't want to make public, and we have a lot of work to do before we release."

Thanks.

Swift on the Server with some modern CSP flavored concurrency mechanisms would Rock! Then combine that with a Swift-like language that compiles to Javascript, and that language could take over the web.

Yes. But what has that got to do with writing native apps?

It has everything to do with modern languages with powerful features.

Nothing. Don't look too far into it.

They probably just used python as an example of something most people would know. Its probably the most known scripting language out there so why not use it.

Besides ALL benchmarks are pointless, even when you have the source of the benchmarks and know what they ran on software/hardware wise.

I don't know much Python, but swift seems to be aiming more in that direction than ruby or js for instance.

On the superficial level, the use of line breaks to separate statement (although ; can also be used), on the deeper level the is an accent on accessibility and no non sense behaviour, where other language might have made more compromises on readability for instance.

Python was mentioned in a "generic object sort" benchmark. It's likely that the purpose of that slide was to show that Swift is a lot faster even when dealing with dynamic dispatch.

Runtime speed is only tangentially related to the fact that they are compiled ahead of time or not.

I guess the comparison with Python is that Swift code looks more like Python than C.

Perhaps because the syntax of Swift is so simple that it almost looks (and hopefully feels) like a scripting language? (type inference, no semicolons, automatically managed memory)

It's a comparison of how fast they made a dynamically typed language. (Yes, Objective-C is considered dynamically typed as well.)

I think it's the most popular obj-c/cocoa binding.

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