Over the last few years, there has been an upsurge in the number of mobile phone applications being developed by the business houses. This is majorly owing to the rapid increase in the number of mobile phone users and market across the globe.
In such a scenario, it becomes essential to focus on developing such applications that are user-friendly, easy to use and understandable. With iOS taking a lead in introducing new and latest products in the market, it is essential to use such an iOS app development programming language that turns the app into a high-performing application.
Among the large number of iOS app development programming languages, Objective-C and Swift are the most popular. However, gradually Swift is taking over the entire market. Swift is a programming language that has been developed by Apple to serve general purposes.
Used mainly to develop codes for iOS, Watch OS, Linux, and TVOS, the language offers its users a number of value add features of Objective-C, which, in turn, make it an ideal programming language to build user-friendly and engaging apps.
Preferred by numerous top-notch companies, there are several reasons for giving Swift a preference as an iOS app development programming language.
1.Easy to Read
As compared to Objective-C that makes use of @ to differentiate different keywords and types from C-types, Swift can unify all the keywords and culminates the need of the numerous @ symbols. Swift also ends the need of using semicolons at the end of each lines.
Instead, it makes use of the standard comma-separated list of parameters within parenthesis. All these and similar other changes have enabled the development of a simplified and cleaner language.
2.Low Maintenance
Unlike C and Objective-C programming languages that uses two-code files to improve the build time of executable app development, Swift combines the Objective-C header (.h) and implementation files (.m) into a single code file (.swift).
This is because the Xcode and LLVM compiler can easily figure out dependencies during development as well as enable incremental builds automatically in Swift 1.2.
The language is also helpful in reducing the workload on programmer, which, in turn, allows them to spend more time on developing the logic of the app.
3.Ensured Safety
As compared to Objective-C in which calling an uninitialized pointer turns the line of code no-op and causes a huge number of bugs, it is possible to keep a nil optional value clear in Swift. This implies that a compiler error would be generated if a person writes a bad code.
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Writing codes in Swift saves a lot of time and money as bugs and errors can be fixed while the code is written. The optional types and value types keep it clear in the method definition if a value exists or if it can be kept as optional.
4.Amalgamated with Memory Management
Using Swift programming language can lead to better productivity as it provides support for Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) across the technical and object-oriented code paths. Using Swift ends the programmer’s responsibility to handle memory management.
When working with different Graphics APIs available on iOS. Moreover, the best part of using Swift is it ends the problem of huge memory leaks that a programmer might face with other programming languages.
5.Requires Less Coding
Swift uses less amount of codes especially in the case of string manipulations and repetetive statements. This is because Swift makes use of the modern features available for programming languages. For instance, it adds two strings by using “+” operator.
The language also allows for string interpolation. This, in turn, ends the need to learn tokens and instead, makes it easier for programmers to add variables directly inline to a user-facing string, such as a label or button title.
6.Fewer Name Collisions
Swift language provides in-built name spaces. This, in turn, allows the same code file to work across different projects without requiring any special names such as CG Point (Core Graphics). The availability of this feature in Swift improves productivity of programmers by ending the need of bookmarking.
It is also easy to differentiate classes for the programmers using Swift as it allows to do so using the same namespace identifier. This feature has enables multiple software companies to create the same code filenames without the concern of any sort of collisions when integrating open source projects.
7.Supports Dynamic Libraries
This is one of the biggest reason for Swift being a preferred iOS app development programming language. Using dynamic libraries is advantageous as these include executable group of code that can be linked to an app. This, in turn, allows for easy link between the existing Swift apps with its newer versions.
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It is with the evolving of Swift that has enabled the support of dynamic libraries on iOS, even while these were already supported on Mac. The enabling of this feature has made the programming language changes and improvements to take place faster without making its users to wait.
In simple words, Swift programming language is a boon for the programmers. Apart from the above, the language is also more approachable and fully featured. While the world can notice its role in the development of iOS apps, the day will come soon when it will also be used for the development of other Apple applications.
