Should You Use Swift for iOS App Development?

Swift programming language came out in 2014 and is an iOS exclusive programming language. The concept was to have a programming language through which one can write easy code. The most popular objective-c programming even though still powerful is relatively a hard language to get your hands on if you are looking to get in the coding game.

Now swift is a modern language with features like closure, generics, type inferences, namespaces, object orientation and so much more. Designed to be fast, safe and facilitate interactive coding, the feature playgrounds included in Swift allows for dynamism and interactivity.

When running XCode for coding the feature playgrounds lets the user immediately observe the result in the sidebar to the right. When it comes to speed Swift was found to be a hundred times faster when compared to objective-c.

One of the major cons of Swift right now is that the language is relatively new so the people who jumped to Swift have only a five-year experience with the language when compared to a 20-25 year experience on objective-c. Due to this, the language is still new to have best coding practices.

Why should you use Swift?

Swift File

The user while using Swift no longer has to create these .h and .m files. The .h is the header file and the .m file is the implementation file. All of the swift code written in Swift just belongs in a .swift file.

So you dint have to declare these function signatures anymore which is a lot easier to omit from your code. One another thing about swift is that the user can also include related classes inside the swift file and this can potentially reduce the number of files that you have inside an app dev project.

Type Inference

The thing with Swift a lot of developers think is really nice to have is the ability to perform type inferences. This means that whenever a user declares variables in coding when you use Swift you longer have to declare the variable type if you have already defined it to be something.

The IDE and the language itself will pretty much infer what that type is. This means that the user does not have to type so much anymore while using this language.

Supports Optionals

Swift supports this thing called Optionals. This means that the user no longer has to run to those strange use cases where the user is passing messages and trying to invoke methods on no objects.

This is a really good thing because while using the objective-c you encounter a lot of crash reports where the message is “unexpected nil value found” and because of that the user has to access something on a new object which does not prove to be a really good thing to do.

Convenient Code Readability

Although a lot of code is similar to objective-c the language wasn’t made using objective-c so this makes Swift the only language in which it is the easiest to read and write code.

The user can find a simple syntax when writing code in Swift when compared to objective-c. The users have to use a semicolon at the end of any parenthesis for conditional statements in objective-c and also get errors if semicolons are not included but this is not the case with Swift.

Similarly, the user does not have to add commas at the end of parenthesis and within so there is no need to create loops in your coding.

Rapid App Development

Development speed is where Swift takes it all away from any other programming language out there. Swift has proved to be 8.4 times faster than Python and up to 2.6 times faster than objective-c.

So with an easy coding set up and a fast processing speed any app development agency or a customs iOS app development company can complete projects at a faster and a more convenient way than before.

Open Source

The biggest advantage with Swift is that it is Open Source, being open source means that developers will be able to add on to the language and help accelerate the language’s adoption rate.

Through open-source Apple is looking to build a strong developer community. All the public source code is stored at GitHub and can be downloaded. The user can also file bugs and contribute towards the community to build their own bug fixes. This, in turn, can have a massive impact on the evolution of the programming language.

So Apple making Swift open source is a clear message that they want this programming language to become a pioneer to programming for the next 20 years. So if you are a programmer you will definitely get even newer heights as these languages progress further.