Swift Development for iOS- The Good, Bad and Latest
Swift has been the official language of development tasks done by various developers and programmers. This language enables development of apps for various verticals by apple such as the iOS, iPad, watchOS, macOS and many more. This language was introduced by apple way back in 2014 as the official de-facto language used by Apple for its app development activities.
Now whenever a new technology comes in, it is intended to solve a particular pain point or problem. Swift was introduced to solve the pain points that were present in the development activities done by Objective C. Objective C has long been used by Apple for developing apps under its ecosystem. Developers have high expectations using the swift language.
Here in this article we will discuss the various benefits and the drawbacks of the swift language, the good, the bad and the latest about swift.
The excellent part of Swift is that it provides the intuitiveness and compactness as well as the clean conciseness that code gives to its developers and programmers alike. This enables programmers and developers to create fast as well as responsive software. Using the Swift language developers can create anything related to SaaS programming that works on the Cloud infrastructure, iOS apps and systems programming.
Let's see the good or the advantages of using the Swift language.
- Development is fast as well as maintenance is fast.
When developers use the swift language compared to do the tasks of programming and designing. When you compare it to objective C the same tasks that took about many different lines of code to accomplish can be done with much less code as well as faster compilation and execution is done. Swift has an uncomplicated syntax and is known for its expressive language being cleaner and much easier to read and understand. The swift code is known to eliminate antipatterns in code and this leads to much cleaner and well precise and expressive code that does wonders when it comes to app development.
2. Improved safety for developers:
Safety has been the core idea behind the development of the swift language from the ground up. The clarity that the language is able to provide enable developers to create less mistakes when creating code for its applications as compared to Objective C. This results in fewer errors and crashes that are related to coding. Swift developers are able to instantly see and rectify the coding errors because of its clean syntax and the clarity that is provided by the code.When the question is about bug fixing, it takes a short amount of time to correct all errors when you directly compare it to its predecessor, Objective C.
3. Much better performance compared to Objective C
Right from the start, the focus of this language has been to provide developers with much better speed as well as performance. The first release of Swift promises to provide about 40% better performance when you directly compare it to Objective C. And 40% is a huge improvement over the previous objective C language that apple used to develop for its applications.
4. Less memory footprint when used with dynamic libraries
Swift provides less memory foot print when developers use Swift along with dynamic libraries. The absence of static type libraries makes sure that the memory utilized is never exhausted or clogged up. Because dynamic libraries have a single copy in memory as well as the copy is present in only a single file instead of multiple files, this decreases footprint and provides benefits when you utilise third party code in your swift application.
5. Large and open source community
The community that exists for swift language consists of eager to help developers and programmers who are always ready to solve any issues that may arise for fellow developers and programmers alike. This provides a way to benefit the community and provide instant help to those who need it and can leverage the queries faced by iOS developers and solve them instantly.
Now lets see the Bad or the disadvantages of using Swift language
- Still a relatively young language
There is no doubt that the language is progressing with full throttle and is emerging under high development rate. But when you compare it to the Objective C, which has been a matured language, the swift language still has miles to go before it can fully emerge into a mature language.
2. Not enough native libraries and tools
Because swift language is just 6 years old, there is not enough native libraries and tools that are available for use for development of apps using Swift. The functionality that is provided by these libraries are also under development and yet to be released. So as time passes by we may see many different libraries and tools coming up for swift, but until then the functionality is limited to what can be achieved using Swift.
3. Nascent or immature talent pool:
Because the talent pool is not still mature enough, there is not much things that you can extract from the developer community. As this community is still at a growing stage.
Conclusion: So we have seen the Good, the bad and the latest about swift language, This language has still yet to go a long way when it comes to becoming the defacto and the main language which apple developers can use to create apps for.
