Apple’s Swift will be a programming language for Android
This actually cropped up on June 26 when I noticed the news, but Apple’s Swift programming language will officially be extended to support development of Android apps, following the creation of a dedicated Android Working Group with the Swift open-source project.
It’s yet another big step forward for the Apple-supported Swift programming language which was originally introduced for Apple’s operating systems, and now also supports Linux and Windows.
A glass of water where?
What this means of course is that in the end developers using Swift should find it possible to publish applications across all the supported platforms, including all Apple devices, Windows, Linux and in future, Android. Getting there may take a while, but the journey has begun according to the official Swift forums.
The Android Working Group’s charter describes the aims of the project. “The primary goal of the Android workgroup is to establish and maintain Android as an officially supported platform for Swift,” they explain.
“The Android workgroup will:
- Improve and maintain Android support for the official Swift distribution, eliminating the need for out-of-tree or downstream patches
- Recommend enhancements to core Swift packages such as Foundation and Dispatch to work better with Android idioms
- Work with the Platform Steering Group to officially define platform support levels generally, and then work towards achieving official support of a particular level for Android
- Determine the range of supported Android API levels and architectures for Swift integration
- Develop continuous integration for the Swift project that includes Android testing in pull request checks.
- Identify and recommend best practices for bridging between Swift and Android’s Java SDK and packaging Swift libraries with Android apps
- Develop support for debugging Swift applications on Android
- Advise and assist with adding support for Android to various community Swift packages”
Read the Android Workgroup charter
Discuss ideas in the Android forum
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