The latest version of Apple's young programming language, Swift, will be one of the stars of the show at Apple's World Wide Developers conference (WWDC) which begins June 13.
The programming world has never seen anything like Swift. Apple launched the new programming language a mere two years ago. And its name was a premonition — it caught on like wildfire.
As of this week, some 59% of people building iOS apps are using Swift, compared to 39% who are still building apps with the former programming language, ObjectiveC, among the 100,000 developers using the young and up-and-coming mobile database called Realm, says Realm VP Tim Anglade.
But Swift still has a major problem
Even more interesting, many of Realms users are enterprise app developers, people building custom mobile apps for a company's customers, employees, or partners.
AppleApple wrote this poem about apps for its WWDC 2016 conference
That's traditionally a group that's slower to adopt new stuff. They prefer to wait until the new stuff is stable.
"Swift has crossed the chasm — if you’re not using it you’re behind," Anglade tells us.
What's crazy is that these folks are flocking to Swift even though it still suffers from a major flaw. It's not stable. Every time Apple releases a new version of Swift to give developers access to the new features in iOS, Anglade says it breaks their apps.
