Swift’s deliberate design choices over the years has resulted in a language that showcases how flexibility and compatibility does not need to come at the cost of usability. One of these design choices was Swift’s focus on native interoperability with other languages. The flexibility that this enables makes it a joy to build rich, native experiences in Swift across a variety of environments. By Saleem Abdulrasool.
Swift embeds a copy of clang, the C and C++ compiler, which is able to directly translate between the languages avoiding penalties in code size and runtime performance. This level of interoperability composes wonderfully with existing systems and enables building complex software atop existing C libraries. You will also learn about:
- The Windows API
- Component Object Model (COM)
- COM support in Swift with C Interop
- COM support in Swift with C++ Interop
- Improving Swift language support for COM
- Interoperability on Windows
Swift’s arsenal of interoperability tools makes it a potent language for building rich, native applications and libraries on existing platforms, and provides a great alternative to C and C++ with its improved memory safety and ergonomics. On Windows particularly, the interoperability features allow us to gain access to a very large set of the system’s API. Best of all, since COM is used outside of the Windows ecosystem, improvements to Swift’s integration with Windows system APIs, such as the native COM bridging described above, would also help other platforms! Nice one!
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