Swift (programming language)

A programming language developed by Apple Inc.

 This article is about the programming language.
   For other uses, see Swift (disambiguation).

The logo of the Swift programming language

Swift is a general-purpose programming language developed by Apple Inc. for its platforms and beyond. It was first introduced at Apple's 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). 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.

History

Swift was announced by Apple at the 2014 WWDC and was made available for developers to use in Xcode 6 beta. The language was designed to be a modern replacement for Objective-C, with a focus on performance and safety. Swift 1.0 was released in September 2014, and it has since undergone several major updates.

Features

Swift is known for its modern features, which include:

• Safety: Swift eliminates entire classes of unsafe code. Variables are always initialized before use, arrays and integers are checked for overflow, and memory is managed automatically.
• Performance: Swift is designed to be fast. The language is optimized for performance and the compiler is designed to make the most of modern hardware.
• Syntax: Swift has a clean and expressive syntax that is easy to read and write. It includes features like type inference, generics, and closures.
• Interoperability: Swift is fully interoperable with Objective-C, allowing developers to use both languages in the same project.

Development Environment

Swift is primarily developed using Xcode, Apple's integrated development environment (IDE). Xcode provides a suite of tools for developing software for Apple's platforms, including a code editor, a debugger, and an interface builder.

Adoption

Since its release, Swift has been adopted by many developers and companies. It is used to develop applications for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Swift is also used in server-side development and has been adopted by companies like IBM and Google.

Open Source

In December 2015, Apple made Swift open source under the Apache License 2.0. The source code is hosted on GitHub, and the community has contributed to its development. The open-source nature of Swift has allowed it to be ported to other platforms, including Linux.

Related pages

• Objective-C
• Xcode
• Cocoa (API)
• Programming language