Tuesday, 3 May 2016

iOS - Why Swift is Favored Over Objective-C

Thanks to Apple, Swift has the potential to become the prominent programming language for iOS applications, due to some of it’s key, valuable features. Objective-C was developed in the early 1980’s, and since then has been the preferred language used for iOS and OS X apps, that is, until Swift was introduced at WWDC in 2014. Apple’s goal was to make iOS application development more approachable and easier than ever.
For example, here is what printing “Hello World” looks like in both programming languages:
Swift:
Let str =”HelloWorld”
printIn(“\(str)”)
Objective-C:
NSString*str =@”HelloWorld”;
NSLog(@”%@”, str)
If you’re not already a developer, Objective-C may look more intimidating than Swift. Swift is cleaner language, making it easier to learn, read, maintain, and code. Here are a few reasons that by using Swift, you’ll be sure to be ahead of the game, and why the future favors this programming language:
Swift is easy to read and requires less code.
Swift does not require any legacy conventions, making programmers not need to use semi-colons, @ symbols, or brackets in most cases. Without the use of some of these symbols, the code tends to be cleaner and easier to read.
Many even say that it resembles the natural English language, along with more modern languages. It makes it much more straightforward for JavaScript, Python, of C# programmers to grasp Swift into their programming language tool box.
Simplicity of maintenance.
Objective-C requires programmers to maintain two code files in order to improve the build of any app, while Swift only requires one file. Swift combines both of the files of Objective-C (header & implementation files) into one single code file.
With this new language, software engineers can do less bookkeeping and focus more on the application logic and new features.
Swift is safer and faster.
Hence the name of the language, Swift is uniquely fast and can improve the speed that an app runs at. To get the most out of Mac’s, iPhones and iPads, the code is transformed into optimized native code using the high performance LLVM compiler.
Variables of Swift are always initialized before use, arrays and integers are checked for overflow, and memory is managed automatically when coding in Swift. Because of this, Swift defeats entire classes of unsafe code.
Objective-C may not be going anywhere for awhile, but you will be seeing applications built in Swift coming up in the future faster than the past 2 years. Fundamentally, Swift is more of an approachable programming language than Objective-C for most mobile application developers.
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