Apple (AAPL) closed out the keynote address of its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco Monday with what CEO Tim Cook calls “the mother of all releases for developers.”
The company announced the arrival of a brand new programming language called Swift that Apple says will allow developers to create apps faster and more easily. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, told a crowd of thousands of software developers that the new language will coexist with the Objective-C programming language, making it possible to integrate Swift into existing apps.
The release of Swift is paired with a new interactive feature for development program Xcode called Playgrounds that allows developers to instantly see the results of their coding.
The keynote’s audience was treated to a demo with a developer showing how to use Swift and Playgrounds together by programming in real-time a relatively simple 2-D game over the course of about 5 minutes.