Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language for macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Linux. Developed by Apple Inc., Swift is designed to work with Apple’s Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks and the large body of existing Objective-C code written for Apple products. Swift is fast, safe, and modern, and provides developers with powerful features for creating robust and powerful apps.
Swift is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language developed by Apple Inc. in 2014. Swift is designed to work with Apple’s Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks and the large body of existing Objective-C code written for Apple products. It is built with the open source LLVM compiler framework and has been included in Xcode since version 6, released in 2014.
Swift is designed to be fast, safe, and expressive. It is built with the open source LLVM compiler framework, which makes it easy to create powerful and efficient code. Swift combines the best in modern language thinking with wisdom from the wider Apple engineering culture and the diverse contributions from its open-source community.
Swift uses the same runtime as the existing Objective-C system on Mac OS and iOS, which enables Swift programs to run on many existing iOS 6 and OS X 10.8 platforms.
Swift supports many core concepts associated with Objective-C, including protocols, closures, and categories, but it also introduces several new features, such as generics, tuples, and type inference. It also provides modern features such as type safety, pattern matching, and access control.
Type Safety: Swift is a type-safe language, which means that the language helps you to be clear about the types of values your code can work with. This enables you to catch and fix errors as early as possible in the development process.
Closures: Closures are self-contained blocks of functionality that can be passed around and used in your code. Closures in Swift are similar to blocks in Objective-C and lambdas in other programming languages.
Generics: Generics are a powerful tool that allow you to write flexible, reusable functions and types that can work with any type, subject to requirements that you define.
Tuples: Tuples are a collection of values that can be stored and passed around in your code. They are useful for returning multiple values from a function call.
Pattern Matching: Pattern matching provides a concise way to check for and respond to a variety of conditions in your code.
Access Control: Swift provides fine-grained access control to your code, allowing you to specify which parts of your code can be used by other code and which parts are private.
Here is an example of a simple Swift program that prints "Hello, World!"
print("Hello, World!")
Pros
Cons
Objective-C: Swift is designed to work with Apple’s Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks and the large body of existing Objective-C code written for Apple products.
LLVM Compiler: Swift is built with the open source LLVM compiler framework and has been included in Xcode since version 6.
Xcode: Xcode is Apple's integrated development environment (IDE) for macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. It includes a source code editor, a graphical user interface editor, and many other features to help developers create apps for Apple's platforms.