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Objective-C and Swift are two programming languages that are widely used for iOS application development. Objective-C was the first language designed by Apple to create iOS App and Swift was introduced in 2014 by Apple.
Swift—a language developed by Apple—is a perfect blend of speed, security, and modern syntax that many iOS developers prefer when building iOS application development. Frequent updates and upgrades allow Swift to meet modern requirements. Swift was initially adopted by many big organizations, such as Lyft, LinkedIn, and Yahoo, for their iOS applications; now anyone building native iOS apps uses Swift.
If you want to know why Swift is the perfect choice for your iOS app development, we have mentioned a few benefits of it here.
Swift has more clean, concise, and expressive syntax than any other programming language. This helps developers read and navigate code easily without much effort, making the development process much faster and more efficient. It also has other features that make development faster, such as ARC automatic memory management and Type inference, which help developers in faster development and intuitive coding.
On the other hand, the unified error-handling feature makes error management a lot easier and eliminates the need to check errors multiple times. Also, on the official Apple website, they claimed that Swift is 2.6 times faster than Objective-C.
Developing a safe and secure iOS app is a priority of any iOS app development company. Any mistakes in coding can cause app crashes and usability issues. Swift has better error handling and management capabilities than Objective-C. It is designed with safety features that help developers write more reliable code and allow them to catch errors early in the development process.
Swift has both mutable and immutable variables. Mutable variables can be defined using the “var” keyword, and you can modify them anytime. An immutable variable can be defined using the “let” keyword, meaning it can't be changed once the value is defined. Also, Swift encourages the use of immutable variables and constants by default. This prevents the chances of accidental modification of data and enhances code clarity and safety.
Swift offers an immersive interactivity environment that allows developers to see the results as they write code. So developers can identify and rectify errors at the coding stage. Also, this feature makes learning and prototyping much easier than ever before.
Interoperability with Objective-C is another reason to consider Swift for iOS app development, which means it works seamlessly with Objective-C in the same project. For example, if you have developed your application with Objective-C and now you want to use Swift. You don’t need to write everything from scratch, as Swift and Objective-C code can coexist. Just introduce Swift gradually in a project while maintaining & protecting your old code base.
You can keep your older module in Objective-C while writing new module code in Swift. Developers with expertise in Objective-C can also contribute alongside Swift developers.
Apple primarily developed Swift to build iOS applications but now Swift has features to build Android applications as well. Here Swift leverages the transpilation mechanism to make this happen.
Transpilation means converting the source code of one language into another programming language. There are two frameworks that developers can use one is SCADE and another is Skip to Transpiling Swift source to Android’s native Kotlin. This helps developers a lot as developers just need to write a single codebase in Swift and with the help of these frameworks they can deploy it on both platform iOS and Android.
As Swift is open-source, it has a large number of users who continually contribute to its growth. For instance, a large number of open-source libraries are available on GitHub. Tools such as Alamofire can be used to simplify networking tasks, and SnapKit could help developers with auto layout in iOS applications.
Apart from this, Apple also offers detailed documentation that has everything from basic Swift core syntax to advanced things such as memory management and concurrency. This rich availability of resources allows developers to speed up iOS application development and helps them find quick solutions for the common issues that occur during app development.
Open Source
To make improvements and keep it well-designed and well-structured, Apple made Swift open-source in 2015. This helped Apple in exposing Swift in front of every potential iOS app development company to use it for iOS app development. By making it open source, Apple wanted to get feedback from the users so they could make necessary improvements.
Another reason to consider Swift for iOS app development is that Swift is deeply integrated with the Apple ecosystem such as XCode, WatchKit, And SwiftUI. Xcode is Apple’s development environment, where SwiftUI is the Ui framework to build the user interface for iOS applications.
And WatchKit is a framework to build an application for WatchOS. It offers various tools and APIs to build applications for the watchOS app. Also, an app developed with Swift can run on any platform including iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. This seamless integration with the Apple ecosystem makes app development a lot easier and faster.
Swift has an in-built functionality for memory management called Automatic Reference Counting. Which helps in the automatic handling of memory allocation and deallocation. It also ensures that objects are only kept in memory for as long as they are needed. It tracks and manages the memory of the app and reduces the memory leak. These help developers a lot, as it eliminates the requirement for developers to do it manually.
ARC makes memory management more sophisticated and better than Objective-C; it also reduces memory-related bugs and improves memory efficiency significantly.
Swift has a much faster execution speed than Objective-C, and that is because of modern compilers and optimized architecture. The Swift architecture is designed and developed to make the most of any Apple hardware, whether you are developing an app for iPhone, iPad, or macOS.
Mobile applications developed with Swift give much smoother interaction and better performance compared to apps developed with other old technologies.
With Swift, developers can develop much more stable and lighter apps because Swift has in-built memory management functionality that helps in reducing the footprint. Which allows developers to write code without manual cleanup.
Swift is considered to be much easier to maintain than other programming languages such as Objective-C. If developers use Objective-C for iOS application development, they have to keep two separate files to enhance the build time and code efficiency: one for C and another for Objective-C, because Objective-C depends on language C.
Here Swift is not dependent on any other languages; instead, it combines two code files, C and Objective C, in a single file called .swift. This makes it easy to handle and low-maintenance.
Swift is a versatile language because it’s not just limited to mobile app development, you can utilize it for server-side development as well. There are a number of server-side frameworks and tools such as Vapor, Kitura and SwiftNIO that developers can leverage to develop backend services in Swift. These frameworks handle some of the important aspects such as routing, database integration and request handling.
Products which are developed using Swift are future-proof and easier to scale, So anytime you can extend your product with new features very easily. Also onboarding of new developers is relatively much faster because of the simplicity and conciseness of the codebase. The syntax in swift is almost the same as natural english which makes it much easier to read Swift code.
SwiftPM is an inbuilt tool in Swift that automates the process of downloading, compiling and linking dependencies and helps in distributing Swift code. With SwiftPM you just need to specify dependencies in a Package.swift file that your project needs. That’s it it will automatically download it, compile it and integrate it in the project. It also eliminates the requirements of tools such as Cocoapods and Carthage.
With SwiftPM, developers can easily create and share reusable Swift packages. SwiftPM makes it very easy to handle the different versions of dependencies, also it ensures that your project uses the correct version of dependencies.
Apple is now giving more priority to Swift as they want Swift to be the future of development for their entire apple ecosystem including iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS. Also Apple's new frameworks are developed and introduced with Swift-First such as SwiftUI. Which is a UI framework that developers can use to create a user-interface with less code. It's entirely written in Swift. Apple's Vision OS SDK - A development environment for their new product category Vision Pro is developed with Swift and SwiftUI. As it’s being prioritized by Apple, leveraging it for ios app development would be much beneficial.
1. Syntax & Readability
- Syntax resembles natural language. It’s very easy to read.
- It utilize dot notation for method call
2. Safety & Optional
- Has introduce optionals type
- Less chance of null pointer error
3. Type inference & Static Type
- It’s statically typed language with type inference to deduce type that help you in safety and conciseness.
4. Maintenance
- Simple as code stored in only a single file that developers have to manage.
5. Memory Management
- Automatic memory management as it use ARC
6. Developer hiring & On-boarding
- Easy to find and hire developer, On-boarding is also fast as simple syntax
7. Learning Curve
- Easier for beginners because simple syntax
1. Syntax & Readability
- It has more complex syntax than Swift. And syntax are longer for defining properties.
- Uses square brackets for method call
2. Safety & Optional
- Lacks support for optional type
- Chances of null pointer error are high
3. Type inference & Static Type
- It’s Dynamic type language so don’t have to specify type explicitly
4. Maintenance
- Complex as two separate file need to be managed by developer ie. one for c and another for objective c
5. Memory Management
- Limited Automatic Manual memory management features
6. Developer hiring & On-boarding
Hiring is bit hard to find developer as most of them are moving toward Swift, Onboarding is also hard due to complex syntax
7. Learning Curve
- Bit harder due to complex syntax
Due to several benefits of Swift, it has overtaken objective C completely for native iOS development. It’s also visible that iOS apps developed using Swift are fast, secure, and perform much better than applications developed using other languages. The open-source community around Swift has also evolved, and there are frequent updates on Swift to handle the current ecosystem requirements. Swift can also be used to create Android Apps as well, this can help a swift developer to create an Android App. Currently, Swift is not being used much to create Android apps as well, however, in the future, it can gain traction. Swift adoption for creating iOS and Android apps can reduce the overall cost of app development for various mobile platforms.
This blog is published by James Smith.
