Swift is Apple's new, modern a Multi Paradigm, Compiled programming language for iOS, OS X, and Watch OS development. Swift is an alternative for the Objective-C language that employs contemporary programming language theory concepts and strives to present a simpler syntax. During its introduction, it was described simply as "Objective-C without the C".
Swift is built with the LLVM compiler framework included in Xcode 6, and uses the Objective-C runtime, allowing C, Objective-C, C++ and Swift code to run within a single program.
History:
Development on Swift began in 2010 by Chris Lattner, with the eventual collaboration of many other programmers at Apple Inc. 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 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) application became the first publicly released app written in 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-compatible with the test version. Apple planned to make source code converters available if needed for the full release.
- Swift first appeared in June 2, 2014.
- Swift 1.1 was released on October 22, 2014, alongside the launch of Xcode 6.1.
- Swift 1.2 was released on April 8, 2015, in conjunction with Xcode 6.3.
- Swift 2.0 was announced at WWDC 2015.
Swift provides seamless access to existing Cocoa frameworks and mix-and-match interoperability with Objective-C code. Swift combines the best in modern language thinking with wisdom from the wider Apple engineering culture. The compiler is optimized for performance, and the language is optimized for development, without compromising on either. It’s designed to scale from “hello, world” to an entire operating system. All this makes Swift a sound future investment for developers and for Apple. Swift is a fantastic way to write iOS, OS X, and watchOS apps, and will hope that apple will continue to evolve with new features and capabilities.
It was announced that Swift 2 would become open source later, supporting iOS, OS X and Linux. It will going to be a great fun to learn such a fantastic language, can't wait to explore it more...
