If you are a startup and looking to develop an iOS app, it is important to select top iOS app development company. Once you partner with a trusted iPhone development company, the choice between Swift or Objective C will be a daunting task. Introduced at Apple’s 201z4 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language for macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS. With refinement of language and the API conventions for the frameworks, Swfit 3 ensures that your code is consistent and moving forward.
Here is Why Startups are turning to Swift for iOS App Development:
Open Source
Startups often need to do the balancing act. They are often walking the tight rope with limited funds. Open Source technology makes Swift very cost-effective for startups. With the support of the open-source community, Swift is growing really fast. Previously, Objective C monopolized native iOS apps development, however, Swift has effectively broken the monopoly with a change.
Fast and Powerful
Using LLVM compiler, Swift has been built to be fast as well as provide high-performance. As a worthy successor to both C and Objective C languages, Swift includes low-level primitives such as types, flow control, and operators, as well as object-oriented features, giving Cocoa and Cocoa Touch developers the performance they demand.
Easy to Adopt
With Swift, you get Objective-C interoperability. You can create new application with Swift or begin using Swift code to implement new features and functionality in your app. Swift code co-exists with your existing Objective-C files in the same project, with complete access to your Objective-C API.
Less Code, Less Cumbersome
Swift is a light and compact language for programming. Less code means better readability and simplicity. Swift language is less error-prone and controls you from making mistakes. Swift eliminates entire classes of unsafe code.
Easy to Maintain
Safety of apps and user information is paramount when it comes to mobile applications. In today’s highly volatile and competitive marketplace, security is one aspect that startups just can’t afford to compromise. If the app is easy to maintain, then it is an added advantage. When it comes to Swift, it offers both benefits of being easy to maintain and secure. It produces safer and secure apps compared to Objective C. Further, as Swift does not have any legacy code, it is easy to maintain.
Developer’s Choice
Apple’s new age Swift programming language is easier to understand even for non-iOS developers. It is light, simple and easy to use often reducing the room for error for mobile app developer. These factors often increase productivity of developers.
Features of latest version of Swift
The migration from Swift 3 to Swift 4 has been an easy one when compared to the huge code change one had to go through in the previous version. The migration tool of Swift would help you 80% of the way, if you are using Swift 3.1, and the extra fixes can be done quickly. But, considering this, there are certain features of the new version which can take longer time to update since one might need to rewrite the code by using the new syntax and functionality.
Xcode Setup
The new Swift version needs the Xcode 9 IDE that can be downloaded from the Apple Developer portal. One can then unpack the special .xip file and open Xcode to set up the dependencies like command line tools and SDKs.
The Xcode 9.2 is perfect to build targets which are written in either Swift 4 or Swift 3. This can be a great help if you are working on a large project which has been divided into multiple frameworks, in this way your code can be migrated from Swift 3 to Swift 4 one framework at a time.
Refreshed String Manifesto
The String type in Swift 4 has gone through a new change. Previously, It had been removed in Swift 2, but now in the latest version, it conforms once again to the ‘Collection’ protocol. Simply enumerating over a string will give you all the characters.
Generic Subscripts
Previously, in the older versions of Swift, developers were supposed to define a specific return value type in the subscript. Now in Swift 4, one can define a single generic subscript that infers the return type based on the defined result value.
Encodable and Decodable Protocols
If you are a larger part of the Swift community, you might know that one of the most common topics of discussion is JSON parsing. With the new version now, you do not have to parse or encode your class, struct or enum manually, since refreshing the archival and serialization APIs in the Foundation framework is already done. You simply need to add the ‘Codable’ (which is an alias for Decodable & Encodable) to the class’s inheritance list and use the JSONEncoder to encode an instance of the class.
Various other features include:
- There are other generic improvements, backed by the completion of conditional conformance support, curbing the amount of boilerplate code and allowing code to be more reusable.
- Basic library features contain improvements to the Hashable protocol and a unified set of randomization functions and protocols.
- Batch-mode compilation support, that helps improve build times.
- A twitch in the calling convention for the retain/release cycle, to curb code size and enhance performance.
- Recursive metadata support and increased-compact reflection metadata.
- Deflection arguments inlined at call sites.
- Multiple bug fixes, such as for inheritance of generic initializers.
- The compiler directive that is syntactically equivalent to the #if swift version check but checks against the version of the compiler. It doesn’t matter which compatibility mode is running.
- The new Swift package manager capabilities have been added. Support for batch mode has been included. Enhanced scheme generation logic; and autonomous Xcode project creation.
Conclusion
With each new programming language, there are tall claims about increasing developer productivity. The immediate productivity gains are incremental. Small and continual improvements create value for developers as they learn to leverage new tools and produce the same output quickly with fewer lines of code. Swift is an important step in that direction.