Each of you who is planning to develop an iOS app must rethink about the programming language you choose for the development. Whether you do it yourself or outsource from an iOS app development firm, selecting a programming language is a big question. While Objective-C has been doing well until now, most of us are hesitant in taking a risk with an entirely new package.
But honestly, Swift is worth taking a plunge and using for your next iOS app. You will be sure by the end of this article.
As per Wikipedia, Swift is open-source, compiled and multi-platform language created by Apple Inc. to write codes for iOS, MacOS, WatchOS, tvOS app development.
Swift has been embraced in 2014, showing significant growth in 2015 and 2016. However, it’s benefits are still not recognized by developers and IT businessmen because people lean towards using a familiar language and then when we have Objective-C for iOS app development, why do we need a new language?
- Swift is the first industry-quality systems programing language, which is as expressive as a scripting language. There is an amazing feature of Swift Playgrounds, allowing developers to experiment with Swift code and see the results immediately. They encourage inactive coding, while receiving feedback along the way, thereby improving the app instantly without any delays and waiting for the deployment to happen. An intelligent move for all app owners to launch fast and start generating revenue from the app.
With a strong error handling system and robust typing mechanism, Swift ensures stable and less erroneous code with fewer potential errors. Fast and powerful, all the codes written in Swift are compatible with latest hardware and thus, it makes the most out of them. It provides Cocoa developers the power and simplicity of coding to create some high-quality apps.
- Leaving behind the legacy conventions, Swift imparts more readability as its smooth like a text, without semicolons to end lines and parenthesis to surround conditional expressions inside if—else statements. Also, developers are set free from the bracket mess, i.e. nesting of brackets is no more a problem while debugging the code as method calls do not nest the code with brackets inside brackets. The methods are rather separated by commas. This improves the speed of programming and makes it a faster development language.
So, the result is a cleaner and more expressive code with simplified syntax. It’s more like a natural English code, unlike the syntax-oriented Objective-C.
- Requiring less code, Swift is unified with memory management in a way that Objective-C never was. In Swift, Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) handles all memory management during compilation such that the programmers need not worry about managing the memory while working with core graphic APIs and other secondary APIs available on iOS. Swift encourages automatic and high-performance memory management, which in turn, relieves it from running any Garbage collector for unused memory cleaning like Java and C#.
One of the benefits that’s still unknown to many is Swift’s support for dynamic libraries, which is a boon for the iOS app owners as the language itself updates the libraries with major OS upgrades like from iOS8, iOS9, iOS10. Dynamic libraries are a collection of codes that’s executable and linked to an app, which allows the existing Swift apps to link to the new and updated versions. These dynamic libraries are included within the App bundle that’s downloaded from the App store. Further, dynamic libraries propagate the language improvements and changes faster, reducing user’s time.
So, a modern programming language like Swift evolves faster than iOS itself. Swift is the influencing future of iOS app development for many years to come, as the language is more approachable and loaded with rich features.
When deciding between Objective-C and Swift, do examine the project context thoroughly with Project Manages and technical team as they can assist you with some expert moves. Our team at Konstant is adroit in Swift and has delivered several projects that are making great money from iPhone users. Call us for an expert assistance; we’ll provide a SWIFT solution.