Apple’s Swift – A Unique Programming Language for iOS

We, 9series, took fastest and adequate steps to develop the Mobile Apps using Swift. As a developer, you need to think about developing the iOS apps using Apple’s Swift 3, which is open-source, about Swift’s new features and why you need to learn it. We, at 9series, have identified these evolution changes and pushed ahead of our next strides in developing mobile apps using Swift.

Apple is extremely pleased that Swift is open source and we, 9series, also agreed that this is an excellent step forward for the programming language and for Apple. And so that 9series has started doing all their iOS development using Swift technology. Another great step that has put forward from a language and platform perspective is the ability to run Swift on MacOS, iOS, WatchOS, TvOS, and Linux. This is quite interesting because it shows the dedication on Apple’s part to beat the language forward and gain support from the C community on Linux as well.

Over the last 2 years, Swift has already changed a lot and version 3.0 is no different in this thought process. Since early December of a year ago, in preparing for Swift 3.0, Apple has said that their main focus for Swift was to improve the stability and maturity of the language with the next release. This is an excellent goal, but as per our opinion, this is a little out of context still because if you have been following the Swift Evolution mailing list or the Github project, you will know that there are a lot of big syntax changes to Swift 3.0 and this maturity and stability of the language is not planned for the development jump from Swift 2.3 to 3.0 but from Swift 3.0 to 3.x or 4.0 instead. Maturity and Stability are coming on the way and 9series is strongly following this evolution that Swift 3.0 is simply laying the groundwork for this to start happening.

Objective-C to Swift API Example:

Objective-C to Swift API stay consistent but also become less verbose and easier to type and remember on the fly. While shortening verbose API calls is pretty significant, another significant change that was made was new type names to some of the traditional types that used the original Foundation prefix of NS. Below are two examples, one of the new NSDate type and one of the new syntax for Grand Central Dispatch that was demoed at the state of the platform, looks a bit like JavaScript, doesn’t it?

// NSDate Example
var myDate = Date()

// Grand Central Dispatch Example
let queue = DispatchQueue(label: “com.9series.queue”)
queue.async {
// perform action
}

To aid in the construction of great Swift libraries, one of the major goals for Swift 3 is to define a set of API design guidelines and to apply those design guidelines consistently.

Pros:

1. Swift is easier to read and write:

• It has less overhead and syntax requirements, and you can often achieve the same line of code using fewer characters.

2. Swift can result in shorter overall code length:

• Swift is a functional programming language, which means you can do neat tricks like passing functions as variables. This implies you can compose highly generic code that can do a lot of different things, reducing repetition.

3. Swift is less error-prone:

• Its syntax and language constructions exclude several types of mistakes potentially possible in Objective-C.

4. Swift is faster:

• Its performance approaches the one of C++ which is considered the fastest algorithm calculation arithmetics. In December 2014 Primate Labs published a report on Swift and C++ performance. To make the long story short, Swift 1.2 was a bit slower than its competitor.
• Nevertheless, we all see how Apple strives to improve the speed of Swift. They have, actually, been doing it very successfully so far. For example, Swift 2.0 has beaten C++ in several computation algorithms, such as Mandelbrot algorithm.
• Objective-C is slower because it contains C API legacy.

5. Swift is open-source.

6. Swift is interactive:

• Swift Playgrounds have introduced new opportunities to developers. This tool makes it possible to test code on the spot without arranging huge bits of it or making the entire app.

There are good alternatives to use Swift other than Mobile App Development. So, 9series has been doing all their iOS development using Swift. As Swift technology getting mature and due to its successful evolution, 9series has been strongly following this technology.

Alternatives other than Mobile App Development:

What Is Perfect?

Taking a pretentious name comes ‘Perfect’ from Perfectly Soft Inc, a development agency specializing in tools for Swift developers, releasing the first server-side Swift implementation.

Perfect is a web server and toolkit for developers using the Swift programming language to build applications and other REST services. It gives developers a chance to fabricate using the only Swift to program both the client-facing and server-side of their projects. It’s the perfect backbone for cloud and mobile technologies. Developers can be more productive and efficient using Perfect to write less code and work in one fundamental language for all of their needs.

Why Perfect?

One Development Language
Use Apple’s open source Swift programming language throughout your entire development process. Whether you’re building an iOS and Mac OS X apps, or backend support for web apps, wearable technologies, and games, you don’t need to learn another programming language when you use Perfect on the server-side.

Why is Swift a good language for server-side development?

Until now choosing a high-level programming language for your server-side applications it has always been a trade-off. 9series is using a high-level programming language with all the productivity advantages associated with it. They sacrifice high performance and small memory footprint.

On the other hand, when using low-level languages like C or C++, you sacrifice a high level of abstraction and now have to deal with complex issues like memory management, which are inclined to bring about an entire heap of bugs.However, you are gaining much more fine-grained control over performance and memory usage.

Swift changes this because now you can get best of both words. Swift offers high-level abstract programming concept such as memory management, easy string manipulations and safe collections, but without sacrificing performance too much.

With that much above examples, advantages and different perspectives, we, at 9series, has vigorously moved towards the Swift as development language.

Stay tuned for other technical and development articles.