Swift is a general-purpose programming language based on modern software development principles for safety, performance and design patterns. It can be used for almost anything, from mobile and desktop apps, through programming systems, all the way to building cloud services.
It was released in 2014, created by Apple for the iOS / Mac OS ecosystem and for Linux systems. Swift is safe, as it is well-defined, and the codebase is clean and efficient.
It is a fast programming language, which was created to offer power and functionality that’s comparable to C-based languages, like C++ or C. Swift ensures consistent performance across an application’s lifecycle.
Swift is highly expressive, and provides easy-to-use syntax. It shares functionalities with some other languages, for example it uses Objective-C attributes in order to make it easier to build Swift APIs. There are multiple tools in the Swift ecosystem, which can be critical to meet project requirements within deadlines.
It’s important to mention that Swift is safer than C-based programming languages, because the creators avoided implementing classes with unsafe code, making it clean, and less prone to runtime crashes.
Swift can be used across a large range of platforms, devices, and business situations. The implementation of different features may differ from platform to platform.
It is the current language of choice for developing applications for the Apple ecosystem, and it might become the only language for Apple development in the future. It can also be used on Linux and Android. It is a great language for small and medium projects, as well as huge enterprise-sized projects, and it’s easy to maintain in any situation.
The Swift programming language is a big leap forwards from other object-oriented, general purpose languages. The syntax is similar to the english language, and it’s not built on C, so it doesn’t carry the weight of traditional C-based language conventions – like the need for semi-colons, brackets in method calls, or parentheses around conditional expressions.
Swift is able to take care of most memory management tasks on it’s own, freeing up the developer’s time. The language includes low-level primitives like operators, types and flow control, as well as object-oriented functionalities like protocols, generics, and classes.
Code written in Swift is easy to debug, thanks to using a read-eval-print loop to debug and run apps within the development environment. Additionally, the idea of Swift playgrounds comes into play here. It allows Swift developers to render interactive views within the Xcode environment, which makes every change in the code instantly visible in the rendered view, creating a non-consequence playground for developers to experiment with different ways to build functions in the application.
Swift code can be used in software alongside Objective-C, C++ and C. With the LLVM compiler, code written in Swift is turned into highly optimized native code, which is fully capable to take advantage of modern hardware platforms.