Swift programming language developed as well as invented by Apple Inc. for iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Linux. Swift is designed from the ground up in order to work with Apple’s Cocoa. Cocoa Touch frameworks as well as the frameworks provided in the large body of existing Objective-C (ObjC) code written for Apple products. It is built with the open-source and an easy to access LLVM compiler framework. It has been included in Xcode since version 6. With more than 700 million iPhones smartphones that are  currently in use, iOS is the second-most popular mobile platform world over. While Android will be looking to have an advantage worldwide market-share wise, in regions, like the US, France and the UK, Apple devices continue and looks like will also do in future to dominate the market. This is why, so many businesses as well as software companies focus solely on iOS platforms for their software products, as they see it is as their key investment opportunity.

Overview

If you are one of those businesses or companies that are looking to follow the iOS app development, then you have a critical decision to make. That is in simple words, you need to choosing the right tech stack for your product. What is that platform that you are you gonna go for? If it is the native development or platform specific development instead of cross-platform, then which language will you use? The good ole Objective-C or Swift programming language?

Apple had first introduced Swift as the newer and the second official language for macOS, watchOS, tvOS and iOS development  way back in 2014

Despite being very young, and very much immature, Swift made its way up from the ‘Apple’s experiment’ status to the 11’s place in TIOBE’s listing of the world’s most popular programming languages. When we compare the ranking positions, it is 7 positions higher than its older brother or predecessor Objective-C, Swift proves to have completed its initial mission.

Here let’s take at the advantages as well as benefits that helped Swift become a major programming language for iOS app development. We will also analyze the disadvantages that may still hold it back.

Pros and Cons of Swift

Pros of using Swift for iOS development

Transparency

When we directly side by side compared the language to the syntax of Objective-C, it is closer to the notoriously intimidating syntax of C. Swift owes a lot to to create the simplicity of the syntaxes of much more elegant Ruby, Python and C#. The language has been made and designed to be easily readable, since all of its expressions have transparent meanings, and is very simple to learn. In fact, Apple has been very confident in the simplicity  and ease of learning for the Swift language, they encourage kids to create apps on it via games on Playgrounds.

But there’s more to Swift’s simplicity than just being being kid-friendly. The transparency and the learning friendliness that the code provides, enables scaling up any development project easily. New team members or inexperienced developers are able to  shortly catch up on existing app code and start contributing to it faster than they would do with an Objective-C app.

Conciseness

One of the aims that the Apple swift team has committed for is to make the language less verbose or clunky. Thanks to its string interpolation concept alone, Swift has been capable and has been successful in reducing the Objective-C mobile app code by almost 70%. A self-explanatory example is the most popular Lyft app, which lost 2/3 of its initial 75,000 code lines after being rewritten on Swift. Less code always makes faster deployment and fewer bugs, it also states that it causes faster development and testing, cheaper maintenance, as well as fewer resources required for any of these tasks.

Automatic memory management

In order to achieve the best app performance as well as avoid memory leaks. Swift employs and makes use of Automatic Reference Counting across all APIs. In other words or simpler words, it handles memory on its own, enabling the most efficient resource consumption. No manual memory settings or its configuration are needed. All of this are the features that are provided while making the necessary adjustments developers are guided and supported by Swift’s convenient tools.

Safety

Unlike Objective-C or when we compare directly to objective-c, Swift is a strongly and statically typed language, which allows developers to notice bugs prior to compilation and fix them on the fly. Moreover, Swift has also provided its developers with smart null-pointer safety measures that prevent compiling errors due to null references.

Interoperability with Objective-C

Although this is not an outright advantage or a plus point  over Objective-C, it definitely merits on its own. Swift isn’t been designed to provide as a complete replacement to  Objective-C. It will continue to be and stay a part of many mobile apps that will need maintenance in the future. The new iOS development language is made to be compatible is fully interoperable with its predecessor and can coexist with it in one app, file or code line.

Swift is Brief

One of the major out right aims of Swift developers was to make the language concise. Owing or when it comes to string interpolation alone.  Swift has been designed to be made capable enough to reduce the Objective-C mobile app code by almost 70 percent. Less code means faster development, deployment as well as testing processes- thus it provides a cheaper maintenance process and less resource expended.

Easily scalable

The transparency that the swift code provides has been leading to a faster development time. In addition to that, as a developer  you are also entitled that you also get a product that is “future-proof” and can be added with new features. Easier scalability is therefore made possible. Plus, when it comes to your long-term investments, you need to consider this fact that Apple is more likely to support Swift rather than Objective-C.

Recommended Read: Swift vs Objective C: Which one is better for iOS App Development?

Cons of using Swift for iOS development

Speed

The actual swiftness or the faster processing that is done for iOS Swift development has been a controversial issue. This long exists since version 1.0, mainly because the initial results weren’t that impressive. But the language has been capable to high evolution and adaptation for a long time since then, and performance tests results aren’t frustrating anymore. Still, while Apple continues to boldly claim as well as state the fact that Swift is 2 times faster than Objective-C.  Actual tests have been indicating that this is not fully true and don’t back up this statement.

When we compare Swift directly to Java in benchmark task performance.  Swift manages to get an upward advantage here in six tests, shares almost the same result with Java in two tests, and loses to it only in two tests as well. Yet when we compare it with its rival Objective-C , the speed difference between the two is hard to notice.

No backward compatibility… yet

The language is radically evolving, and changing in its technological implementation. It s somewhat unstable since currently, each new version of Swift does not support the previous one. This means that in simpler words,  apps written in Swift 1.0 and 1.2 can’t be maintained in Swift 3.0 and can already be considered history. However, Swift 4.0 does seems at the moment in order to be finally turning the situation around and providing support for Swift 3.0. So, soon there’ll be no need to worry about backward compatibility.

Also Read: Importance Of Developing iOS Application For Your Business

Conclusion

Swift has introduced many advantages to iOS development:

    its conciseness makes mobile apps more lightweight,

    the simplicity enables fast project upscale,

    full interoperability and expansiveness that has been provided compared to Objective-C enables convenient maintenance or further development of previous projects.

Just like Kotlin for Android development, Swift simply needs time to mature. Hopefully, with the passage of time and with a couple of further releases, Swift will achieve its declared performance speed and become a completely stable development tool.

So this was a blog on Pros and Cons of Swift.

Apple launched Swift, a new programming language in 2014. This language can be used for mobile app development and has given iOS developers an alternative to the existing and age-old language that is Objective-C, an object-oriented superset of the C programming language that has been the core of iOS development thus far over the years. Swift has been designed from the ground up to be compatible with the existing iOS development tools- XCode, Objective-C, and the Cocoa framework- but because of its ease of use and improved features mean that it is quickly starting to replace Objective-C. In this article, we are going to explore some of the few reasons why you should get on-board with the Swift language for your next iOS app development (Swift vs Objective C) project if you haven’t already.

Swift is Faster, and easier, lets developers become more productive during work

Much of what OS X operating system is based on is developed and comes from the inherited technology that dates back to Apple’s humble beginnings, and OS X’s new components have all been based on the Objective-C that includes mobile apps. Objective-C strengths lie in its stronger graphical user interfaces and feature rich frameworks. But when you compare it with the newer Swift language- it is a clunky one to write.

As the hardware and software of the iOS operating system has evolved over the years and improved with better memory and processors. Apple has been successful in developing a streamlined language that was far better suited for fast-paced app development, and also to solve and address some of the Objective-Cs disadvantages. By unloading some of the Baggage that comes with the 30+- year old language like C, Swift has been designed to make the iOS developer’s life easier and more productive.

Compatibility with the Cocoa Touch Framework as well as The Objective-C Language

Frameworks are nothing but libraries of coded modules that makes developing applications faster and much more streamlined for developers. The frameworks that are associated with Apple’s operating system are Cocoa(for OS X) and Cocoa Touch( For iOS). When the modules are written in Objective-C language, Cocoa Touch is specifically designed and geared towards touch-based devices such as iPhones and iPads. So what should this mean for a newer language like Swift?

Swift is fully compatible with Objective-C and when it comes to developing apps in Cocoa Touch, for the mobile framework for iOS. It works along with Objective-C so that developers can interface with the two languages, create mixed-language apps, and it takes advantage of Cocoa Touch classes with Swift, and Swift classes with Objective-C. The interchangeable classes, design patterns, and APIs have thus made it easier for the developer to pick and choose.

Migrating code from Swift to Objective-C is easy too, and vice versa. Developers can take advantage of Swift’s advanced features by replacing chunks of app code written in Objective-C with Swift.

Swift has been designed from the ground up with the Cocoa Touch framework, you only need to set up a Swift development environment in XCode and then import Cocoa frameworks, APIs and Objective-C code modules in order to get started.

Advantages of Swift:

1. Swift Runs Faster, almost as fast as C++, And with the newer versions of Xcode released in 2020, it is much faster than before.

2. Swift is easier to read and implement, and is easier to learn than Objective-C: Objective-C is over 30 years old now and that means that it has a more clunky syntax. Swift is able to streamline code and more closely resembles readable English, similar to C#, C++, JavaScript, Java, and Python. Developers that are experienced in these languages can easily pick up swift pretty quickly. Also Swift requires less code. Compared to Objective-C which is verbose when it comes to string manipulation, Swift employs string interpolation without the use of tokens or placeholders.

3. Unified files make code easier to maintain: Again, an age-old standard is holding the C language holds Objective-C back. This is the two file requirement. This means that programmers and developers need to update as well as maintain two separate files of code, compared to Swift, this becomes one. That means less work for programmers and developers, but this does not come at the cost of speed for the front end.

4. Better Compilers means a better coding experience for developers and programmers: Swift is built-in with a Low Level Virtual Machine(LLVM), this is a compiler that is used by languages like Scala, Ruby, Python, C# and Go. The LLVM is smarter and faster than previous C compilers, so more workload is transferred from the programmer to XCode and the compiler.

Recommended Read: iOS 13 vs iOS 12: Which Apple Operating System Is Better?

5. No pointer means Swift is more secure: Objective-C similar to C language makes use of pointers, a method that exposes values more directly to data. The problem with using pointers is that it makes and causes vulnerabilities in security. They also create a barrier for finding and fixing bugs. However using Swift, your code’s pointer is missing a value(a nil value) instead of continuing to run the app, it causes the app to crash and allows you to find and fix the bug on the spot. You will also have cleaner code and you will spend less time looking for bugs down the road, as time passes by.

6. Better management of memory: Memory leaks can occur in object-oriented programming, and apps and they are known to decrease the available memory for an app to run causing the app to fail. Typically, Cocoa Touch APIs are used to support Automatic Reference Counting(ARC). This is a streamlined way to handle memory management. But when looked upon in the context of the core graphics API, ARC is not available, it is up to the developer. This is a common pitfall when an app is using big data buffers, video or graphics. When the amount of memory being used is just too much during a memory leak, the app can be shut down by the operating system. In order to fix this Swift supports ARC across APIs and this stability means that programmers have to spend less time focusing on memory management.

The future of Objective-C

While many existing apps that are written in Objective-C will need to be maintained and this means that Objective-C will not be obsolete any time soon. Apple’s existing APIs require a bit of code adaptation in order to work with Swift. Xcode updates have caused this to change along with newer releases as well.

Also Read: What’s the best way to learn iOS development with Swift?

Conclusion:

There is no doubt that Swift is the future for iOS apps development. It is time that Objective-C took a back seat and enjoyed the show being put up by its successors. If you liked this Swift vs Objective-C article, then do check out our other blogs as well. If you are looking to hire Swift developers or looking to develop an iOS app then do contact us at enquiry@nimapinfotech.com. We have talented developers ready to onboard your project in the best budget for you.