Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language created by Apple.
It is used for building apps for iOS, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch.
Designed to give developers more freedom than ever, Swift is easy to use and open source.
It is safe, fast, and interactive, making it a great first programming language to learn.
Swift is incredibly fast and efficient. It uses a high-performance LLVM compiler that transforms Swift code into optimized native code.
It is designed to be safe. Swift eliminates entire classes of unsafe code, such as uninitialized variables or out-of-bounds arrays.
Swift is also highly in demand. Because it is the primary language for Apple platforms, knowing Swift opens up lucrative career opportunities in mobile app development.
It is open source. Developers all over the world can contribute to the language and bring it to new platforms, such as Linux and Windows.
You can build almost anything that runs on Apple devices.
Mobile apps for iPhone and iPad are the most common use case.
You can also build powerful desktop applications for macOS.
Furthermore, Swift can be used for server-side programming using frameworks like Vapor.
Swift was introduced by Apple in 2014 at their Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).
It was developed as a replacement for Objective-C, the previous standard for Apple development.
By 2015, Apple made Swift open source under the Apache License 2.0.
Since then, it has evolved rapidly, with continuous improvements in performance, syntax, and features.
Swift is designed to be readable. You don't need to write semicolons at the end of statements.
Here is a simple example of a Swift program:
print("Hello, World!")
Notice how clean the code is. There are no main functions required for a simple script, and no complex boilerplate.
Swift is a modern, fast, and safe programming language.
It is the key to unlocking app development on the Apple ecosystem.
In the next chapters, we will dive deep into how to write and execute Swift code.
Which company created the Swift programming language?