The Swift community has announced the formation of a workgroup the aim of which is to advance the interoperability support between Swift, the language originally developed by Apple as an alternative language to Objective C, and C++. 

Swift's designers aim was to provide a single language including the best ideas from languages such as C# and JavaScript, while being easy to use. It was made open source by Apple in 2015.

The new initiative regarding C++ was announced by Alex Lorenz, who will be responsible for setting up the meetings, going through the discussion points, and posting the agenda and the meetings notes on the Swift forums. He pointed out that there has been a lot of interest in achieving bidirectional interoperability between Swift and C++, and noted that, with some hard work, the Swift compiler is now able to import and use some C++ APIs, including C++ standard library types like std::string and std::vector.

Lorenz said:

"To advance the interoperability support between Swift and C++, we are announcing the formation of the Swift and C++ interoperability workgroup as part of the Swift project."

The workgroup will provide the framework for those interested in Swift and C++ interoperability to:

"work together to refine the interoperability layer's goals and design. Additionally, the workgroup will establish an ongoing discussion about the related Swift compiler changes to implement interoperability support."

The initial focus for the workgroup will be on how to ensure a rapid development of the interoperability model between the two languages. To this end, they will design the interoperability model first, and then will bring it back for formal evaluation and discussion with the Swift community via the Swift evolution process.

Lorenz also announced a new "C++ interoperability" sub-section of the "Development" section on the Swift forums, open to everyone , that will be used for the relevant technical discussion posts on C++ interoperability.

More Information

Swift and C++ interoperability workgroup announcement

Swift Org

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