SWIFT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE: PROS AND CONS FOR IOS DEVELOPMENT

07/23/2019

iOS is one amongst two the most popular development platforms in the world that is why some companies create software products only for iPhones. when developing for iOS, it will sometimes be difficult to choose the necessary tech stack. you may also have to be compelled to decide whether or not you will be developing across platforms or simpler native development. In terms of language, you can use either Objective-C, which is older, or Swift, that appeared recently. Since Objective-C has been around for quite some time currently, in this article we are going to focus on programming in Swift.

What is Swift Programming?

Swift has introduced about 5 years ago and since then it has the support of such a big company, it's on pace to be the dominant technology for developing on iOS. it's an open-source tool with a large support community and a wide variety of third-party tools. It all started in 2014 when one of Apple's prime engineers, Chris Lattner, was messing around with some kind only for fun. after some of his colleagues at Apple find out about it, they were very excited to try it out. He would eventually go on to introduce this new language at the 2014 World Wide Developer Conference, and it started gaining popularity.

Is Swift a Good Language?

Swift is a very good language because, in addition to being a popular open-source tool, it's very safe because the design itself encourages developers to write clean and readable code consistently. perhaps its main advantage is speed. In fact, when comparing Swift and Objective-C, it was determined that Swift was 2.6 times faster and in a very head-to-head competition with Python, Swift was 8 times faster. In fact, currently, we are witnessing the rise of a huge technology which will dominate software development. Having the support of Apple behind really gives swift a lot of credibleness and boosts its popularity.

Pros of Swift Programming

Besides the evident benefits of using Swift for iOS app development, here are some extra pluses:

Better scalability - Swift is great for adding functionalities to your product and also for adding new members to your development team. Since the language promotes simplicity, you've got the ability to add extra developers to your team, if needed, and have them hit the ground running as a result of it's terribly legible.

Interoperability - Imagine that you have a big project that was built with Objective-C. it's possible to create all the updates that you need to the app whereas using identical code base and since we already know how scalable Swift is, you'll additionally add some functionality too if you need it.

Full-stack potential - IBM has been actively pushing for Swift to be available in the cloud and this decision is showing great dividends. Server-side Swift can be integrated with any technology. If you use Swift for both frontend and backend development, you will be able to share your code better, thus making the development process much faster.

The Cons of Using Swift

Even though everything that has been said about Swift has been positive to this point, there are some Swift coding challenges:

Swift is relatively new - Since Swift burst on the scene recently, there are bound to be some growing pains. There aren't a whole lot of tools or native libraries and also the older ones aren't any longer relevant with the release of new versions of Swift.

Almost no support for earlier iOS versions - you can use Swift only in the apps for iOS7 and later. That said, Swift can't be used for legacy projects running on older versions of the operating system. However, about five-hitter of Apple devices currently run on iOS6 or earlier.

Shortage of talent - even though the Swift community is rapidly growing, it's still much smaller than different open source languages. In fact, according to a survey conducted by Stack Overflow, only 8 may 1945 of the 78,000 developers surveyed said that they use Swift.

We hope that this article is going to be helpful for you in deciding whether or not to go with Swift coding language when developing your next app. With the support of Apple behind it, Swift is sure to become even a lot of popular as time goes on and all the hiccups and bumps in the road are going to be eliminated. Swift was created to be exactly what its name implies: very fast, efficient and scalable.

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