The Swift programming language is highly applicable to writing programs that perform analysis on scientific data. Swift is/has:
- easy to learn and modern syntax
- runs on Linux, OS X and also iOS
- comes with a free and highly capable IDE (Xcode) on OS X with inbuilt debugger
- a REPL for experimenting with code
- an ecosystem of open-source packages on Github
- the ability to make C function calls inline
- last but not least, superb performance in compiled form
ScienceKit is a free Xcode 7.2 workspace that contains a number of example projects. Each project demonstrates how to use scientific functions and libraries (modules) available in the project. Projects presently contain:
Upsurge - simple but high-performance SIMD functions for vectors and matrices, digital signal processing and image manipulation
HDF5Kit - read and write access to HDF5 files for scientific datasets
SwiftCSV - utility for easily reading columns and rows of CSV files
All libraries provided have been built with the Swift version 2.2 snapshot provided by Apple. In order to use a project, you will need to follow the installation instructions at https://swift.org/download/#latest-development-snapshots