Apple's Swift for Android Development

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Apple's Swift for Android Development
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Apple's Swift
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Apples Swift Language

• Apples Swift Language which was intended only
  for iOS and OS X apps will become available for
  Android development as Apple has decided to open
  source Swift.

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LLVM

• LLVM actually generates assembly for an imaginary
  machine instead of generating a code for specific
  architecture.

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Swift Compiler

• The Swift compiler is asked to generate LLVM-IR
  (Intermediate Representation)
• The LLVM also generates the ARM ELF file format.
• Later, the Android Native Development Kit (NDK)
  which lets you use native code languages
  generates binary linking against the generated
  object file.

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SwiftCore Library

• The biggest issue in using Swift for Android app
  development is the missing SwiftCore library.
  
• But it has to be noted that, not all the Swift
  code requires SwiftCore Library.

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Apples Open-Sourcing Effort

• Apple to include SwiftCore in its Swift
  outsourcing effort. If it is included, getting a
  SwiftCore library on Android will just be a
  matter of rebuilding it.

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Swift Code

• The Swift code was written in Apples Xcode IDE.
  Eventually, the code was moved to Android Studio
  IDE to complete the build process and produce an
  Android APK.

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As a programming language Swift is very much
similar to Java and C. So it is not that hard to
get Swift to compile towards Android. Though,
its not very clear that Swift is better than
Java, it certainly has some newer
constructs.Swift code.
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