Month: June 2015

My Wish For Swift At WWDC: C++ Support

At work, we support a lot of platforms. We support iOS and Android, Windows, Linux, supermarket checkout scanners, Raspberry Pis, old Windows CE devices, and more. And all the devices run our same (large) core code, and all that code is written in C++. I’m not the biggest fan of C++. But there’s no doubt when we need to write something that works across a range of platforms, it’s a rich, commonly understood tool. It’s also been a massive blocker for Swift adoption for us.

For our mobile customers, we do provide both Java and Obj-C APIs. They’re both just wrappings around our C++ core, and they do the conversion from all the Obj-C or iOS native formats into the raw buffers we need to handle in our C++ core. Whenever I look at doing a Swift native SDK in the future, I’m still stuck on not having native C++ support from Swift code. In order to provide a pure native Swift API in the future, I’d have to wrap our ever growing C++ source base once in Obj-C, and then wrap it again in Swift. It just doesn’t make sense to wrap the same code twice over. Continue reading “My Wish For Swift At WWDC: C++ Support”