Swift is a young open source cross-platform programming language for app development. It has been presented at WWDC 2014 by Apple developers.
Swift is simple and flexible and might seem familiar to Objective-C developers as it based on combined experience of C and Objective-C basics. Otherwise, Swift creators took best from Javascript and Python as well. It opens an access to existed Cocoa frameworks and compatible with Objective-C written code.
As Swift is a quite new language, there are some unflattering statements exist about it.
Forget next misconceptions if you heard them:
- Swift is one the hardest iOS app programming language to learn
- Swift performance is less powerful and poorly developed comparing to the already existing languages;
- Swift is less popular and has a smaller community because it’s younger than most.
- Let’s overview the pros to make sure that the future of app developing favors Swift.
The newer – the better
Every new technology must be greater than the previous one with it’s issues solved. That is the point of evolution. Apple developers made an effort to design a modern programming language with more precise syntax (they got rid of the verbosity of Objective-C). As well as in Objective-C, the memory-management implementation in Swift is simplified through a mechanism called Automatic Reference Counting (ARC). The frameworks had been upgraded as well.
Also, Swift is more fun: you can use emoji in your code.
Time goes faster. So as the development
App development with Swift takes less time (the rate of implementation of some algorithms is in 3.9 times more than Python). Another important innovation is the ability to write code and see the results in real time. During a long time until now the process of product development and the product itself were divided, so programmers had to spend a lot of time by checking and optimizing the code. Swift allows to amend and immediately see the result. That means that developers will be able to quickly check their concepts in practice and overall build applications faster.
Safety is over all
Swift is strict about types. Type inference lets you know what exactly data type you work with. If the a piece of your code is waiting for String, type-safe will not let you to convert Intto it by mistake.
The type-safe allows you to catch and correct bugs during the development process as soon as possible.
Swift is immature yet, it is still growing, changing and opening new opportunities. Choosing it means being ahead of the game, because it’s unexplored potential can be the exact reason why your application will be successful.
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