Introduction:
Swift programming language took the iOS app development industry by storm since its introduction in the market and thereon, it did not look back at all gaining success and appreciation from developers all around the globe. Swift has conquered majority of the iOS app development market since its introduction as it is a pro-developer programming language which is quite friendly with beginners and helpful for the professionals as well. The best part of Swift is that by using this language, the developers can build applications for all the Apple devices available in the market such as iPhone, iOS, iPad, MacBook, Apple TV and Apple Watch.
Features:
What differentiates one language from another is the set of features that a language carries in itself. Here are some of the top features of Swift:
- Open Source Programming Language
Swift is an open-source programming language made by the site Swift.org which is known for its dedication to open-source Swift community. Being an open-source language, Swift provides safer and faster app development as well. - Interactive Playgrounds
Swift’s Playgrounds are extremely beneficial for professional developers as the programmers are able to test new algorithm routine or graphics without actually building a complete iPhone application. - Safety
Unsafe codes are entirely removed by Swift. Moreover, Swift produces a compiler error as soon as a bad code is written as Swift objects cannot be zero in any scenario. Therefore, a lot of time and money are saved with Swift by reducing time spent on fixing errors. - Advancement in Syntax
More expressive codes can now be written with introduction of Swift’s new syntax features such as generics explanation and null-ability making the codes cleaner and safer. - Powerful and Fast
In order to transform Swift code into native code which is optimized, Swift uses the amazingly high-performance LLVM compiler thus improving itself vastly. Also, object categorization has been made faster than Python with the use of Swift language. - Compatibility with Objective-C
Swift is completely compatible with Objective-C thus allowing the developers to make projects which involve those files which are written in either of the two languages. App development with mixed-language codebase is therefore also possible with Swift due to this feature.
Benefits of Swift:
The outstanding workability of Swift programming language along with above-mentioned features provides a number of advantages some of which are mentioned here briefly:
- Development Time is reduced by a huge margin.
- Swift is extremely low-maintenance.
- Swift is built for safety and leaves no chances of developing harmful bugs.
- Swift is an open-source programming language which can be used for backend infrastructure and across a variety of platforms as well.
- Experiment possibilities are increased with its playground mode.
Swift marks the future of iOS app development?
Swift definitely has bright chances to be the future for iOS app developers because of the following reasons:
- Easier to Read
Swift code resembles natural English language to a huge extent and is therefore accepted by both beginners and professionals for making their tasks easier. - Easier to Maintain
Swift has the ability to combine two different files (.m) and (.h) into a single file which is (.swift) thus making it easy for the developers to update and improve efficiency of codes thus bringing down the maintenance hardships. - Safer
Unsafe codes are entirely removed by Swift. Moreover, Swift produces a compiler error as soon as a bad code is written as Swift objects cannot be zero in any scenario. Therefore, a lot of time and money are saved with Swift by reducing time spent on fixing errors. - Requirement of lesser codes
Swift language makes it easy to add two strings simultaneously with “+” operator thus joining characters and strings in the most fundamental way as required by any modern-day programming language.
Conclusion:
Swift has overcome a lot of shortcomings which were there in Objective-C thus making its place on top of the programming languages for iOS app development. Swift is indeed the future of iOS application developers willing to create secure and high-performance applications in considerably lesser time. It has seen a huge success till date, and is surely going to move up on the charts in future as well until an even better language is developed in its competition.
