139: ‘How Many Fingers Should This Baby Have?’ With Special Guests Craig Federighi and John Siracusa

Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi joins the show for a wide-ranging half-hour discussion about Swift — Apple’s new programming language that just went open source.

Next, John Siracusa returns to the show to follow up on Federighi’s segment on Swift. Other topics include Apple’s new Smart Battery Case for the iPhone 6/6S, and our mutual (and perhaps futile) desire to head into this week’s premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens knowing as few spoilers as possible.

Transcript of Craig Federighi’s interview.

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Links:

• Craig Federighi talking about Swift going open source with Ars Technica, TheNextWeb, and Mashable.
• Siracusa’s explanation of Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) in his Mac OS X 10.7 review in 2011.
• Siracusa’s excellent introduction to Swift from his Mac OS X 10.10 review last year.
• Glyn Williams post on Quora regarding how iOS devices need less RAM than equivalent Android devices, because Android’s virtual machine uses garbage collection and iOS doesn’t.
• “The Curious Case of the Curious Case” — my review of Apple’s new Smart Battery Case.
• Michael Tsai’s link roundup on Sketch leaving the Mac App Store.
• Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie’s The C Programming Language, first published in 1978.
• Android’s Dalvik (old) and ART (new) runtimes, both of which use garbage collection.
• “Don’t Drink the Bacta Tea” — spoiler-free episode of The Incomparable last week, with Siracusa, Jason Snell, Serenity Caldwell, and Dan Moren talking about The Force Awakens.
• Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki
• Sci-Fi Corridor Archive. Start here, of course.

This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.