Licensed in 2014, Swift is a statically typed language using LLVM compiler; which Apple claims to be faster than Objective-C. The Targeted APIs for Swift are Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. That’s why there will always be performance differences, even if Objective C and Swift are very common utilities.
Swift handles strings easily, its tuples offer compound variables and the developers don’t need to spend time annotating variables with type info. In most cases, the compiler can also infer the type from the value a variable is set with.
Advantages of Swift
- Swift is easy to read and write, requires less overhead and syntax and one can often achieve the same line of code using less characters.
- Requires less line of code to get the output.
- A much ‘safer’ option
- Unified with memory management
- Swift 1.0 is strong & stable
- Easy maintenance
- Fewer name collisions with open source projects
- Supports dynamic libraries
Limitations of Swift
- Solutions are hard to get, as most of them are in Objective C.
- It’s a moving target. Every small update brings adjustments to paradigms
- Not all the syntaxes are stable yet.
Final Verdict
Swift has a really clean and clear coding style, combining the advantages of Objective-C & features of modern scripting languages. Since faster than Objective-C & powerful debugging tools, Swift has really made people take notice.
With Swift, Apple really tries to speed up the app development process and it shows. It won’t be unfair to say that Swift will change the way people code in the near future.
Did I miss anything? Do you have anything else on Swift that we should know? Share your thoughts with me at [email protected].
I would also appreciate, if you leave your feedback/suggestions below.
