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Phoenix666 writes:

When we first looked at Swift last summer, we predicted it was Apple's future. Objective-C wouldn't go away any time soon, but Apple would almost certainly nudge developers toward the company's new baby for a few years before turning the nudge into a violent shove.

Such nudging has begun. For years, Apple has been adding new features and syntax to the Objective-C language, things like automatic reference counting and closures. These features have generally made it easier and safer to develop in a language that can easily let you shoot yourself in the foot or make ObjC a better fit for some of the design patterns of Apple's own frameworks.

This time around, ObjC gets a grand total of two new features. One of these is a useful feature stolen from Swift (generics); the second lets ObjC behave a bit closer to Swift's expectations (nullability). Realistically, the only reason either of them are here is to make it a bit easier for projects to mix code from the two languages. (Although ObjC developers did get a new tool to help diagnose memory-related crashes—see below—it's not a language feature.)

Swift, on the other hand... Swift gets bumped to version 2.0. This language has received a lot of attention. But let's be clear: a lot of that attention was needed to bring the new language closer to where ObjC was already. That doesn't mean that the new features aren't good; it's just that with one major exception, they're playing catch up.

The article covers the new features added to Swift, among them, error handling. Do those developing for the Apple ecosystem welcome the transition from ObjC?

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