The Key Terms that Proves, How Swift Beats Objective-C

It’s been more than a year that Swift has been launched. This new iOS programming language has gained enough traction from the developer community the praises still continuously coming. The reviews about this language clearly show that this is the future iOS language. People who are going to make their career in App development, Swift will be their first priority in languages.

Launch of Swift

In WDC 2014, Swift is launched by the Apple. This company has given a big surprise to all the developers by launching this new language. The branding of Swift language started with “Fast, Modern, Safe, Interactive” programming language. As per the makers, this language is much easier to learn as well as it will help to make programming more productive.

Why Swift Launched while Objective-C is there?

Everyone was developing iOS apps in Objective-C before the launch of Swift. People have been using this language for more than 20 years. As per the reviews of different developers, Objective-C is much harder to learn as well as the syntax looked weird. The code written in Objective-C for any app looks really weird, it sometimes scares the beginner and so they stops the iOS app development field. That’s why Apple was planning to release a language with clear syntax and easy concepts. Swift has everything that a beginner want. People who are using Swift from the beta release, they say, Swift is much more productive compared to Objective-C. Once a person started the development in Swift programming, it would be really hard for him to switch back to Objective-C.

Key Differences between Swift & Objective-C

The visual of Swift is very good. Simple to read

• Objective C has made the programming somehow more complex. Objective C has introduced @ symbol to differentiate keywords and type from C types. Now Swift is not built via c language, it can unify mostly all the keywords and so removed the @ symbol and make the Swift language easier.

• In swift, there is no need to write any semicolons to end lines. The another good change brings by Swift is, to call methods and functions, you just need to use the industry-standard comma-separated list of parameters within parentheses. No need to use [[[ ]]] that we were using in Objective-C. These kind of small things makes Swift a simple and easy language.

No hard-work needed to Maintain Swift, Simple & Easy

• Objective C is made from language C. To improve build time as well as the efficiency of the app, a developer must maintain two code files if the app is developed in Objective C. While in Swift, no need to maintain two different files, Xcode and LLVM compiler automatically figure out the requirements and perform incremental builds automatically. If you develop apps in Swift, the Objective C header (.h) and implementation file (.m) converted into a single code file with (.swift) extension.

Swift beats Objective C in Memory Management

• Swift is far superior and supportive as well with the other languages while Objective C is lacking behind here. The support of ARC- Automatic Reference Counting in Objective C is only available within the Cocoa APIs and object-oriented code. For procedural C code and APIs like Core Graphics, ARC is not supported in Objective C. So here the responsibility of a programmer becomes double because he/she need to manually do the memory management while working with Core Graphics APIs and other low-level APIs available on iOS.

• This memory management issue of the Objective C is solved in Swift. A programmer who is using Swift, should not worry about the memory for each digital object created by him/her. These processes of memory management are handled by ARC at the time of compilation. So a programmer can totally focus on core app logic and new features. This automatic and superior memory management system helps to increase the productivity.

Swift – Less Code & Better Performance

• If you are making an app in Objective C, you need to write hundreds line of code for repetitive statements and string manipulation. Swift has reduced the code in these kind of things. If you have need of combining two pieces of information, you need to follow a number of steps while Swift is using modern programming language features where you can connect two strings with simply “+” operator.

• In Swift, the compiler can automatically detect the types which reduces the complexity of code statements. In Objective C, if a programmer has used a wrong string, the app might be crash instantly. Swift supports inline methods for manipulating text strings and data which helps you by saving your work from damage in these kind of situations.