Swift – Less Coded Programming Language For iOS Developers

Apple has managed to create a whole new language that borrows heavily from many other languages but eventually is something unlike anything out there. The Swift language is the product of tireless effort from a team of language experts, documentation gurus, compiler optimization ninjas, and an incredibly important internal dogfooding group who provided feedback to help refine and battle-test ideas. Of course, it also greatly benefited from the experiences hard-won by many other languages in the field, drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list.

Key Features of Swift Programming Language:

• It has a simple yet familiar syntax. Many of the boilerplates are gone. That message passing interface is changed to function calls with C-syntax.

• Swift is safe programming language and easy to learn. Syntaxes is really easy for anymore even non-experience iOS developer.

• Swift has generic. All developers get familiar to generic, so that Swift support it handle what developer afraid about datatype.

• Has built-in support for Optional and will prevent nil pointer dereference in most cases.

• You can match anything in Switch/Case clauses.

• Lots of developer think Swift is faster than ObjC. No, it's not. Both use a same compiler Clang LLVM and target to Cocoa (Mac OS X) and Cocoa touch (iOS). How Swift can be faster even it is compiled as same as byte code as ObjC. That's the reason why, you can use both Swift + ObjC in a same project. Swift can call ObjC functions and so do ObjC.

• Swift offer type of inference. Like other language, Swift carries out type inference. Developer don't have to spend too much time for annotating variables.

• Functions and closures are first-class types: Functions and Closures

• Pattern matching and enum cases (something very similar to "case classes" in Scala).

• Extensions to existing types. I found it very similar to Scala implicit classes: Protocols and Extensions

• It supports generics with requirements (i.e., C++ concepts). It's a shame C++ concepts are not there yet.

• It has subscripts, that basically overrides the operator[]: Subscripts

• Swift are familiar to languages such as C#, Ruby, Python. Not as same as ObjC. Now you can forget semicolon at the end of statement.

• It help you group multiple element into a compound variable.

If you mean the fact that assertions are used, I think it is a neat feature. It is very easy to simply assert that something is correct, and move on. In comparison, the try-catch construct in other c-based languages is a bit clunky at times.On another note, I absolutely love Swift's optionals. They basically allow variables and constants to be assumed to always have a value, unless marked as an optional type with a "?". Only if marked as a optional type should a value be nil. The significance is that whole classes of nil errors are avoided by this safety check. This concept reminds me of the Maybe Monad in Haskell, which wraps values as either "Just" their value or "Nothing". It's the same idea that errors encompassing a lack of value can be more logically controlled. -Robert Adkins, ProgrammerYou got SceneKit and SpriteKit which you can use for making games. xCode (the IDE) also comes with a number of tools for designing levels and adding assets etc.The only downside to Swift at the moment I think is that it is still a very young language, so many optimizations have not yet been done. So for writing something like a high performance 3D game engine, C++ is likely better suited. But as a language for higher level logic and for game engines with moderate performance requirements I think it should be quite well suited. - Erik Engheim, Professional iOS developer using Swift

Swift is an almost ideal language for games

It's well suited to creating custom game objects.You can use the struct to represent positions, vectors and matrices.And you can even use operator overloading to make vector math prettier than C++.Swift is absolutely fantastic for experienced developers who have a great understanding of Objective C. It has so many new features that can make our lives exponentially easier, such as optional.However, many iPhone App Development companies don’t find that Swift offers enough new tools or features to justify the shift in language, and that the conciseness of the type actually limits their ability to express themselves. But again, this is a very new language, and as developers continue to use / experiment in Swift, we will get a better grasp of the language itself.

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