Swift Introduction #1
Swift is a new programming language for iOS, OS X, watchOS, and tvOS apps that build on the best of C and Objective-C, without the constraints of C compatibility. Swift adopts safe programming patterns and adds modern features to make programming easier, more flexible, and more fun. Swift’s clean slate, backed by the mature and much-loved Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks, is an opportunity to reimagine how software development works.
Swift is designed to work with Apple’s Cocoa and Cocoa Touch Frameworks and the large body of existing Objective-C code written for Apple products. Swift is intended to be more resilient to erroneous code (“safer”) than Objective-C and also more concise. It is built with the LLVM compiler framework included in Xcode 6 and later and uses the Objective-C runtime, allowing C, Objective-C, C++ and Swift code to run within a single program.
Swift has been years in the making. Apple laid the foundation for Swift by advancing our existing compiler, debugger, and framework infrastructure. Apple introduces a new language for the future of Apple software development.
Swift feels familiar to Objective-C developers. It adopts the readability of Objective-C’s named parameters and the power of Objective-C’s dynamic object model. It provides seamless access to existing Cocoa frameworks and mix-and-match interoperability with Objective-C code. Building from this common ground, Swift introduces many new features and unifies the procedural and object-oriented portions of the language.
Swift is friendly to new programmers. It is the first industrial-quality systems programming language that is as expressive and enjoyable as a scripting language. It supports playgrounds, an innovative feature that allows programmers to experiment with Swift code and see the results immediately, without the overhead of building and running an app.
Swift combines the best in modern language thinking with wisdom from the wider Apple engineering culture. The compiler is optimized for performance, and the language is optimized for development, without compromising on either. It’s designed to scale from “hello, world??? to an entire operating system. All this makes Swift a sound future investment for developers and for Apple.
Swift is a fantastic way to write iOS, OS X, watchOS, and tvOS apps, and will continue to evolve with new features and capabilities.
Swift supports the core concepts that made Objective-C flexible, notably dynamic dispatch, widespread late binding, extensible programming, and similar features. These features also have well-known performance and safety trade-offs, which Swift was designed to address. For safety, Swift introduced a system that helps address common programming errors like null pointers. More fundamentally, Swift has added the concept of protocol extensibility, an extensibility system that can be applied to types, structs and classes, Apple promotes this as a real change in programming paradigms they refer to as “protocol-oriented programming”.
Swift was introduced at Apple’s 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).It underwent an upgrade to version 1.2 during 2014, and a more major upgrade to Swift 2 at WWDC 2015. Initially a proprietary language, it was announced that Swift 2 would become open source later that year, supporting iOS, OSX and Linux.
A current version is 2.1.In next part of this article, you will get Swift tour.
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