Swift Introduction

Here we will learn the basics of swift like what is swift programming, features of swift programming language and evaluation of swift programming development. 

Overview of Swift

Swift is a general-purpose, object and protocol-oriented programming language which is developed by Apple Inc. to support all types of app development for iPad, iPhone, macOS, WatchOS, tvOS and etc. 

 

The swift programming language will support all the fundamental concepts of C and Objective-C like multithreading, optional chaining, late binding, etc. and Apple added some of the advanced features that do not exist in Objective-C like automatic memory management, protocols, primary collection types (array, set and dictionary), tuples, optional types, etc. and introduce protocol-oriented programming.

History of Swift

  • Initially, swift programming language was implemented by Chris Lattner and released in 2010. Later it was supported by other contributors like Apple, etc.
  • On October 22, 2014, Apple released the first version of swift programming language with its Xcode Editor.
  • On April 8, 2015, Apple introduced the updated version of Swift 1.2 in WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) along with Xcode Editor 6.3.
  • On September 21, 2015, Apple introduced the new upgraded version of Swift 2 in the WWDC Conference along with Xcode 8.
  • On December 3, 2015, Apple released the Swift 2.2 version and make it Open Source.
  • On 7 September 2016, Apple just released Swift 3.0 with some changes enhancing the OOP Concept, Identifiers and more.
  • Swift Programming Language also won the most attractive, beautiful and easiest programming language award according to the survey of Stack overflow. 

Features of Swift

  • When compared with other programming languages, the syntax of Swift is very easy and it allows users to write code just like matching with PHP and etc.
  • No need to give the semicolon at the end of the statement which helps the programmers to concentrate more on the code writing, not in semicolons.
  • In Objective C, we manually allocate or release the memory but Swift Programming Language Automatic handles Memory Management.
  • Real-Time Output Swift Programming Language includes the playground feature which will help you to write the code and doesn’t need to run the code separately, automatically it will compile the code and shows the result.
  • Apple announced that Swift is the first programming language that is similar to any scripting language.
  • In Swift, Structure supports the extensions, protocols, and methods.

Swift is a type-safe programming language which means it will help you to identify what type of values required to work with the code. Suppose if we are passing “int” value but our code required “string” in that case type safety will prevent us to send invalid types.