Swift Programming Language

Swift is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, object-oriented, functional, imperative and block-structured language. Swift is the result of the latest research on programming languages and is built using a modern approach to safety, software design patterns by Apple Inc. for iOS applications, macOS applications, watchOS applications, tvOS applications. 

Swift is easy to learn, easy to implement, safe, fast and expressive. Developing Swift in the open has its exciting aspects as it is now free to be ported across a wide range of platforms, devices, and use cases.

The features of Swift are designed to work together to create a powerful language. Additional features of Swift include: 

• Closures unified with function pointers
• Tuples and multiple return values
• Generics
• Concise and fast iteration over a range or collection
• Structs that support methods, extensions, and protocols
• Functional programming patterns, e.g., map and filter
• Powerful error handling built-in
• Advanced control flow with do, guard, defer, and repeat keywords

Memory Management – 

Swift uses Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) to manage memory. Earlier, Apple used to require manual memory management in Objective-C, but after introducing ARC in 2011 memory allocation and de-allocation became easier.

Swift is managed as a collection of projects, each with its repositories. The current list of projects include: 

• The Swift compiler command-line tool
• The standard library bundled as part of the language
• Core libraries that provide higher-level functionality
• The Swift REPL included LLDB debugger
• Xcode playground support to enable playgrounds in Xcode.
• The Swift package manager for distributing and building Swift source code

Advantages – 

• Swift is open-sourced and easy to learn.
• Swift is fast, safe and expressive.
• Swift is approachable and familiar (C and C++ code can be added by Swift programmers into Swift applications.)
• Swift is the future of Apple development.
• Swift is enterprise-ready.

Disadvantages –

• The language is still quite young and the talent pool is limited.
• Swift is considered a “moving target” as it is a new language and the number of swift programmers is few.
• Poor interoperability with third-party tools and IDEs
• Lack of support for earlier iOS versions.