What is Swift Programming

Swift is Apple's new programming language and the future of iOS & OSX app dev.

Swift is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Apple Inc. for iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Linux. Swift is designed to work with Apple's Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks and the large body of existing Objective-C (ObjC) code written for Apple products. It is built with the open source LLVM compiler framework and has been included in Xcode since version 6. On platforms other than Linux, it uses the Objective-C runtime library which allows C, Objective-C, C++ and Swift code to run within one program.

Development of Swift started in July 2010 by Chris Lattner, with the eventual collaboration of many other programmers at Apple. Swift took language ideas "from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list". On June 2, 2014, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) application became the first publicly released app written with Swift. A beta version of the programming language was released to registered Apple developers at the conference, but the company did not promise that the final version of Swift would be source code compatible with the test version. Apple planned to make source code converters available if needed for the full release.

Apple intended Swift to support many core concepts associated with Objective-C, notably dynamic dispatch, widespread late binding, extensible programming and similar features, but "safer" (easier to catch software bugs); Swift has features addressing some common programming errors like null pointers and provides syntactic sugar to help avoid the pyramid of doom. Swift supports the concept of protocol extensibility, an extensibility system that can be applied to types, structs and classes, which Apple promotes as a real change in programming paradigms they term "protocol-oriented programming" (similar to traits).