WWDC

[TheCyclingProgrammer]

Which is why Apple haven't done that. As they explicitly stated during the keynote, you can use Obj-C/Obj-C++ freely alongside Swift.

For now. In 5 years time? I suspect not.

[TheCyclingProgrammer]

Telling developers "we know better than you which tools you should use" is unwise...

Yet that's what Apple do. If you want to develop for iOS or the Mac App Store, you have to play by Apple's rules. If at some point in the future Apple decide they are going to phase out support for Objective-C (and they aren't just going to drop it overnight) then they will. And people will accept it and learn Swift if they haven't already.

Its easy to see which way the ball is rolling. They've been working on Swift for about 4 years as far as I'm aware and many of the recent advances in Objective-C and LLVM have also been geared towards the eventual release of Swift I believe. They obviously decided that they had advanced Objective-C as much as they could with the limitations of it being built on C.

As soon as new developer technologies and APIs start being geared towards Swift rather than Objective-C in a way that makes backwards compatibility difficult, they'll start to phase it out and it won't take that long either. The vast majority of iOS/Mac developers are going to learn Swift and I think most will welcome the change.

Don't get me wrong, I've grown to like Objective-C over the years but I'll be the first to admit there's probably some kind of "stockholm syndrome" about my like for it. Its still early days for Swift, I'm excited to see where Apple go with it.

No doubt there will be some who resist the change and refuse to learn Swift...it will be their loss. They'll become like those people who still write classic ASP in VBScript.

[NickFitz]

As soon as new developer technologies and APIs start being geared towards Swift rather than Objective-C in a way that makes backwards compatibility difficult, they'll start to phase it out and it won't take that long either. The vast majority of iOS/Mac developers are going to learn Swift and I think most will welcome the change.

Don't forget, the existing Obj-C codebase isn't all 99p iOS games or nifty little Mac utilities. How much effort do you think Adobe would have to put in to rewrite their Creative Cloud suite in a new language? Is there any business case for a ground-up rewrite of industry standard video editor Final Cut Pro?

These, and others, are utterly huge amounts of extremely complex code, and Apple's platform needs them. Don't expect to see Obj-C support eliminated in less than the time it takes to rewrite all such apps from scratch, or introduce replacements that take their markets.

[TheCyclingProgrammer]

Don't forget, the existing Obj-C codebase isn't all 99p iOS games or nifty little Mac utilities. How much effort do you think Adobe would have to put in to rewrite their Creative Cloud suite in a new language? Is there any business case for a ground-up rewrite of industry standard video editor Final Cut Pro?

I realise that and I said Obj-C isn't going to go away overnight. But I'd certainly expect Swift to become the only supported language on iOS within the next 3 years. OSX might take longer for the reasons you've stated.

No longer supported doesn't have to mean "won't work"...it could mean: no new developments to the language (I expect this won't take long at all), reduced support on newer OS versions, no support for newer APIs or frameworks. Like I said, it will be gradual and I suspect you'll be able to write OSX apps using Objective-C for quite a while, although you won't necessarily be able to sell them through the Mac App Store.

[MicrosoftBob]

No doubt there will be some who resist the change and refuse to learn Swift...it will be their loss. They'll become like those people who still write classic ASP in VBScript.

I did a project for some american company who were trying to do MVC in Asp (Yup not .Net) and thought using the parallax effect in jquery was cutting edge....shudder

[d000hg]

I realise that and I said Obj-C isn't going to go away overnight. But I'd certainly expect Swift to become the only supported language on iOS within the next 3 years. OSX might take longer for the reasons you've stated.

No longer supported doesn't have to mean "won't work"...it could mean: no new developments to the language (I expect this won't take long at all), reduced support on newer OS versions, no support for newer APIs or frameworks. Like I said, it will be gradual and I suspect you'll be able to write OSX apps using Objective-C for quite a while, although you won't necessarily be able to sell them through the Mac App Store.

Hmm, you can still write OSX applications in pure C++ can't you, using Carbon? That was only deprecated 2 years ago!

[TheCyclingProgrammer]

Hmm, you can still write OSX applications in pure C++ can't you, using Carbon? That was only deprecated 2 years ago!

Carbon is deprecated but pretty much dead in the water, especially if you want to write a native 64 bit app.