Apple's swift language
Apple, the biggest tech company in the world. The company has an incredible net worth of 352 billion dollars and the powerful and intuitive language of Swift helps drive that. Swift is fairly new, it first appeared in June of 2014 at Apples Worldwide Developers Conference and it’s a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled language developed by Apple. The reason Swift was created by Apple was because the language that Apple previously used Objective-C had very little changes since the release in the 1980s. Objective-C had a lack of modern language features so Apple decided to create its own new language.
A Swift-y Language
Apples introduction of Swift intended the language to support core concepts that Objective-C associated with. A few features that are notable are: dynamic dispatch, extensible programming and late binding. Swift has a massive upgrade over the previous languages ability to catch bugs and addressing some common errors. Swift does support the concept of protocol extensibility, the system can be applied to types and classes, which Apple promotes as a real change in programming paradigms. As of Swift version 5.3, the operating system of macOS, Linux and Windows support the language.
Pros of Swift
Swift is a language that strides to be known as a simplistic language like many popular languages are. The main focus is to write less code and with less code there will be less errors and bugs. When a language is simplistic, it can be very readable to new programmers or programmers that want to learn it. Swift is also full stack- it can be used on both client side and server side development. Swift’s performance is compared to other languages and it is considered to be better. Apple states that it is 8x faster than python. With the better performance, the scalability is also very improved from the previous Objective-C scaling.
Cons of Swift
Swift as we know, is a newer language, and with newer languages that alone can be an issue. With it being so new there are less documentation and errors or debugging could be harder to navigate with not much support on the internet. Apple has tried to prevent such issues with providing tools to migrate between versions but it still isn't enough to help every programmer. Tagging along to its immaturity, there aren't many professional developers for Swift. Only about 7% of developers use it and only a few of the have the experience with Swift. Lack of support from iOS7 and macOS 10.9 is also an issue. Swift is not compatible with versions earlier than the two I just stated and cannot offer support. Fortunately, only a few percentage of devices run on those systems.
Conclusion
With Swift being still so new, it offers a lot to programmers. Swift has proven its efficiency and companies like LinkedIn, Vimeo, and Twitter have taken notice. Apple constantly tries to improve the software and fix any flaws to make Swift continue to grow and one day complete takeover the iOS development. So if working for Apple is the dream job for you, learning Swift may be a great thing to do!