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Swift for iOS development

Swift is an open-source, statically-typed programming language that supports both object-oriented and functional programming. It's the preferred language to build apps for Apple Mac, Pad and Phone devices.

From Apple website:

Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language for all Apple platforms. It’s easy to get started using Swift, with a concise-yet-expressive syntax and modern features you’ll love. Swift code is safe by design and produces software that runs lightning-fast.

Key features:​

  1. Open source: Swift is developed in the open at [Swift.org], with source code, a bug tracker, forums, and regular development builds available for everyone. This broad community of developers, both inside Apple as well as hundreds of outside contributors, work together to make Swift even more amazing. There is an even broader range of blogs, podcasts, conferences, and meetups where developers in the community share their experiences of how to realize the great potential of Swift.
  2. Cross platform: Swift already supports all Apple platforms and Linux, with community members actively working to port to even more platforms. With SourceKit-LSP, the community is also working to integrate Swift support into a wide-variety of developer tools. We’re excited to see more ways in which Swift makes software safer and faster, while also making programming more fun.
  3. Safety: Swift eliminates entire classes of unsafe code. Variables are always initialized before use, arrays and integers are checked for overflow, memory is automatically managed, and enforcement of exclusive access to memory guards against many programming mistakes.
  4. Fast and Powerful: From its earliest conception, Swift was built to be fast. Using the incredibly high-performance LLVM compiler technology, Swift code is transformed into optimized machine code that gets the most out of modern hardware. The syntax and standard library have also been tuned to make the most obvious way to write your code also perform the best whether it runs in the watch on your wrist or across a cluster of servers. Swift is a successor to the C, C++, and Objective-C languages. It includes low-level primitives such as types, flow control, and operators. It also provides object-oriented features such as classes, protocols, and generics, giving Cocoa and Cocoa Touch developers the performance and power they demand.
  5. Objective-C and C++ interoperability: You can create an entirely new application with Swift today, or begin using Swift code to implement new features and functionality in your app. Swift code coexists along side your existing Objective-C and C++ files in the same project, with access to your Objective-C and C++ APIs, making it easy to adopt.

Use cases​

Reference of usage in our organization​