Last year Apple launched Swift, the new programming language for iOS and OS X apps. Offering more flexibility than both C and Objective-C, Swift is great for beginners and offers enhanced code reading, debugging, and writing capabilities.
Swift's faster enhanced and automated coding structure – cleaner, more expressive syntax, and greater code readability – provides faster development, increased scalability, and improved performance.
Swift is a simple, safe, and speedy language that is advantageous not only to developers but also businesses. Here is how.
Swift is Simple
Benefits to developers:
Swift is easier to read and maintain. The code closely resembles normal English and it also drops some legacy conventions like semicolons to end lines or parenthesis and nested brackets. This results in cleaner code and a more expressive language.
Below is a code snippet of a function in Swift that shows the simplicity of the language:
One of the main advantages of Swift is you don’t have to maintain two separate code files, like you did in Objective C. Swift combines the (.h) header and (.m) implementation files of Objective C into one - .swift. As a result, Xcode and LLVM compiler can do work behind the scenes to reduce the workload.
Benefits to Businesses:
The increased readability makes it easier to learn and is intuitive to use, so developers using Swift will find application development less cumbersome and much faster. You can expect a cost-efficient and timely application as the development time reduces.
Swift is Speedy
Benefits to developers:
Swift encourages faster development and faster execution with features that include automatic type detection and assigning data to variables. Swift reduces the amount of code and also allows creating generics that allow you to write flexible codes and reusable functions. This makes development much faster. Swift supports Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) which makes memory management easy for developers. ARC handles memory management at the time of compilation which reduces the stress on developers.
The example below states how Swift reduces the burden to developers by enabling them to write Generic functions that can be used with any value type.
The generic function for swapping two integers would be:
The above function can be used with any type of value like Int, String, or Double. However, both variables a and b should be of same type.
Benefits to Businesses:
Marketing surveys suggest that Swift application performance is 40% faster due to its architecture, advanced compiler, and automatic reference counting feature.
Developers can instead focus on core app logic and new features, resulting in speedy deliverables. As a result, an application’s time-to-market reduces.
Swift is Safe
Benefits to Developers:
Apple has ensured Swift to be a much safer language. For instance, Swift makes a smart move in handling null variables. In Objective C, calling a method with an uninitialized pointer variable would not crash the system. This eventually led to a huge source of bugs, wasting a lot of developer time. On the contrary, Swift enables developers to write cleaner code. In case if a null variable is used, Swift will trigger a runtime crash that will force the developer to fix the issue right away making it a safer language.
The code snippet below is an example of an uninitialized variable. This empty variable/string triggers an initialization failure, prompting the developer to fix the issue instantly.
In the above example, the code defines a structure ‘animal’ with a string property ‘species’. The structure also defines a null value with a single parameter called species which checks if the value passed to the initializer is empty. If it finds an empty value an initialization failure is triggered.
Benefits to Businesses:
This can greatly reduce maintenance cost as there will be lesser bugs/issues. Most of the issues will be detected at the time of development and would be resolved right away.
Lastly, Swift’s Playground is an innovative new feature that allows programmers to experiment with code and see the results immediately. Using Playground, developers can avoid the overhead of building an entire application, and can run tests in a secure environment before implementing the final perfected code into a project.
Apple is likely to make Swift a mainstream development language in the near future. With its ability to enable developers to create high-performing, cost-effective apps faster and more easily, Swift will continue to evolve with new features and capabilities.
