Apple's Swift rockets up programming language rankings, jumps 46 spots

Posted:
in iPhone edited January 2015
Just six months after its introduction at WWDC 2014, Apple's Swift continues to generate immense interest with developers and is now the 22nd most popular programming language around, according to new rankings published on Thursday.




In its semi-annual programming language rankings for January, research firm RedMonk found developer interest in Apple's Swift has grown dramatically since its debut last June, jumping 46 spots over the last two quarters.

RedMonk's results are compiled as a function of the number of active GitHub projects and tags counted in Stack Overflow.

The report notes Swift's level of growth is "essentially unprecedented" as compared against other languages. For example, Google's "Go" was introduced in 2009 and only now hit top-20 status. While the rankings are not indicative of commercial market trends, the results offer a broad overview of individual developer interest.
When we see dramatic growth from a language it typically has jumped somewhere between 5 and 10 spots, and the closer the language gets to the Top 20 or within it, the more difficult growth is to come by. And yet Swift has gone from our 68th ranked language during Q3 to number 22 this quarter, a jump of 46 spots.
Swift's announcement at WWDC 2014 last June came as a surprise to many, with Apple positioning the language as heir apparent to Objective-C. The iOS- and Mac-centric tool reached version 1.0 status and was distributed in September as part of Xcode 6.0.

Most recently, Apple and IBM turned to Swift to build 100 enterprise apps with corresponding services in a watershed collaboration.

RedMonk expects Swift to maintain trajectory and breach the top 20 by the time its next report comes out in the third quarter.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 54
    magman1979magman1979 Posts: 1,292member
    :smokey:
  • Reply 2 of 54
    jexusjexus Posts: 373member

    I'm surprised Assembly is as high as it is on that chart.

  • Reply 3 of 54
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Jexus View Post

     

    I'm surprised Assembly is as high as it is on that chart.




    IIRC, to get the best performance out of the PS3 you coded with it.

  • Reply 4 of 54
    xixoxixo Posts: 450member

    Swift's beating FORTRAN?

     

    :no: 

  • Reply 5 of 54
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by xixo View Post

     

    Swift's beating FORTRAN?

     

    :no:

     

    (interestingly, it's far ahead of Objective-C)




    It's far ahead of Objective C++. Not Objective C.

  • Reply 6 of 54
    jexusjexus Posts: 373member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by TheWhiteFalcon View Post

     



    IIRC, to get the best performance out of the PS3 you coded with it.




    With consoles in general, you use a little assembly inlined with C/C++ for performance sensitive areas.

     

    But with the amount of people who treat C as satan(C does have it's problems I assure you quite a bit), it just weird seeing Assembly at such a position.

  • Reply 7 of 54
    pdq2pdq2 Posts: 270member

    Swift is ahead of Visual Basic?

     

    What is this world coming to?

  • Reply 8 of 54
    pdq2pdq2 Posts: 270member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by pdq2 View Post

     

    Swift is ahead of Visual Basic?

     

    What is this world coming to?


     

    Only on GitHub, I guess.

  • Reply 9 of 54
    jexusjexus Posts: 373member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by xixo View Post

     

    Swift's beating FORTRAN?

     

    :no: 




    Fortran has been relegated to HPC markets mostly and even there C++ and Haskell have been making inroads slowly for years.

  • Reply 10 of 54
    xixoxixo Posts: 450member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by TheWhiteFalcon View Post

     



    It's far ahead of Objective C++. Not Objective C.




    I edited just as you posted.

     

    Curious, what's Objective C++ - is that for bringing standard C++ libraries into xCode?

  • Reply 11 of 54
    coolfactorcoolfactor Posts: 2,239member
    This might not be a fair evaluation. Lots of community questions does not necessarily equate to lots of users, but rather lots of problems. :)
  • Reply 12 of 54
    Well I for one am really liking Swift so far although it is taking me some time to transition having only really just started getting my head around Objective-C and Cocoa in the last year...

    My day job is mostly 4GL Progress (with a smattering of c#) so my dreams of being a fully fledged iOS developer are still very much in my spare time which is something I'm lacking at the moment :\.
  • Reply 13 of 54
    xixoxixo Posts: 450member

    Quote:


    Originally Posted by Jexus View Post

     



    With consoles in general, you use a little assembly inlined with C/C++ for performance sensitive areas.

     

    But with the amount of people who treat C as satan(C does have it's problems I assure you quite a bit), it just weird seeing Assembly at such a position.


     

    "assembly" (assembler) is something of a misnomer, since every chip architecture has different assembly mnemonics. 

     

    Intel x86 assembly is dramatically different from Apple A8 assembly...

  • Reply 14 of 54
    jexusjexus Posts: 373member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by xixo View Post

     

    Quote:

     

    "assembly" (assembler) is something of a misnomer, since every chip architecture has different assembly mnemonics. 

     

    Intel x86 assembly is dramatically different from Apple A8 assembly...




    Yes I'm aware. This is why C was/is called the "Portable Assembler".

     

    Edit: Even with X86 there are differences between MS-DOS Mnemonics and AT&T/UNIX Mnemonics.

  • Reply 15 of 54
    xixo wrote: »
    Quote:

    "assembly" (assembler) is something of a misnomer, since every chip architecture has different assembly mnemonics. 

    Intel x86 assembly is dramatically different from Apple A8 assembly...

    I think the last assembly / assembler I attempted was 6502 on a BBC Model B back in around 1990 :D The things you could do with just two registers and an accumulator :)
  • Reply 16 of 54
    xixo wrote: »

    I edited just as you posted.

    Curious, what's Objective C++ - is that for bringing standard C++ libraries into xCode?

    Objective-C++ provides a bridge between C++ interfaces and Objective-C. We wrote it back in 1989 for Lotus Improv. It's evolved ever since.
  • Reply 17 of 54
    xixo wrote: »
    Swift's beating FORTRAN?

    :no:  

    I have never seen a graph like this one...pretty interesting to me as there are certainly I knew there had to be knots of development in languages that were totally off my radar. But as I looked at the names, I was left wondering what in the world happened to Ada, the US government's idea of the "only standard" language for government projects... I didn't see it anywhere on this list... was the last project done in Ada one where citizens could sign up for their desired health care provider???

    Self edit: OMG I found Ada down near the left corner. I truly thought is was dead as a doornail.
  • Reply 18 of 54
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    Where the hell is Pascal? :D
  • Reply 19 of 54
    One thing's for sure, iOS is frickin' here to stay!
  • Reply 20 of 54
    Amazing, expected it to take a year or two to reach top 20, and 6 months.
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