The iOS folks around here are all abuzz about the new Swift language announced by Apple this week. Surprisingly, this information was released publicly, so no NDA required to talk about it.  You can find the information at https://developer.apple.com/swift.

While there are still a lot of questions about the implications of testing in Swift, at first glance it looks pretty straight forward. One nice surprise, reported yesterday on BendyWorks.com, is that  Setup() isn’t needed to create fresh instances of the object-under-test. Simply creating a as a constant stored property of the test case class results in a fresh instance being created for each test.

I’ve run through some TDD katas using Swift, and after some initial adjustment to the new language, I have to say that things appear to work fairly well. I’m really warming up to Swift.

Now the next question is whether or not the existing mock frameworks still work, or how soon we can get updates. No comment from Jon Reid yet, but I’ll bet he will be speaking out soon 🙂