Overview of Swift Programming Language

Swift is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm and compiled programming language. It is developed by the well-known company Apple Inc. with the help of the open-source community.

The language is developed from the open-source LLVM compiler and later included in the Xcode since version 6.

The main purpose behind Swift is to introduce a programming language that is powerful and intuitive for iOS, macOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS.

Well, Swift is quite successful to prove it as a great programming language for devices developed by Apple.

The language is consist of the best of C and Objective-C language, without the constraints of C compatibility.

Some of the key points of Swift

It provides moder programming features.
Provide the usage of safe programming features. The language is focused on safety as well as the clarity.
Swift is the best fit for developing software and apps for Apple devices, for iOS and OS X apps.
Easy to learn and easy syntax.
Comes up with Objective-C like syntax.
In Swift, we can see it united the procedural and object-oriented portions.

The language follows the Objective-C runtime library that allows C, Objective-C, C++ and Swift code to run within the same program. It also took ideas from several other languages like Ruby, Python, Rust etc.

History of Swift language

Swift was first introduced in June 2014 at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.

It was Chris Lattner who was behind the development of Swift with some other programmers at Apple in the year 2010. He was also the creator of LLVM and Clang.

The main aim of the creator of Swift was to overcome the difficulties that exist in Objective-C. For a long time, Objective-C was the main programming language for Apple platforms. But Chris Lattner and his team changed it by introducing to Swift.

He and his team took the basic ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Python, Ruby and some other computer programming languages.

The first version of Swift language was 1.0 and it was undergone a major upgrade to version 2.0 in the year 2015 WWDC (Apple Worldwide Developers Conference).

In the beginning, the language was not open source, but after version 2.2, it become open source under the Apache License 2.0 for Apple platforms and for Linux.

In version 3 of Swift, it had some stability issues. But from version 5, the problem was solved after Swift 5 introduced ABI stability.

After all the journey, ups and downs, at present time Swift is a mature and stable language and is suitable for both small and large projects.

Promising changes in the Lates version of Swift (After version 4)

It becomes faster, Strings are more easier to use that retain Unicode correctness and add support for creating, using and managing substrings.
Smart key paths for efficient, type-safe, extensible key-value coding for the types.
Enhancements in the purpose of creating and manipulating Dictionary and Set types.

Future of Swift

Apple is switching itself from Objective-C to Swift and it is now clear that they will prefer this language as their future projects. Developers in the Apple ecosystem started to use this language widely. Also, the demand for Swift developers increases significantly in tech companies.

Swift now become the main language for iOS app developers. Also, Apple itself takes care of this language, so the future of Swift will depend on Apple. So it looks like there is a bright future for Swift language as well as the Swift programmers and developers.

Also, Swift is now open source and it can also be used outside of the Apple ecosystem. So, let’s see what happens in the future. But one thing is that Apple is going to be here for a long time and the language also.