Also known as: Swift
Swift is Apple’s modern, statically typed, compiled language for building iOS and macOS applications.1 It is clean and fast and prioritises safety, but its centre of gravity remains Apple’s platforms.
Overview
Swift compiles ahead of time to native machine code through LLVM, giving it performance well beyond Apple’s earlier Objective-C in many cases.2 It is statically typed with type inference, supports object-oriented and functional styles, and manages memory automatically through Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) rather than a tracing garbage collector. The language emphasises safety — clear handling of optionals and errors is built into the design.
Strengths and trade-offs
Swift’s strengths are a clean, modern syntax, strong safety guarantees and good native performance, with first-class tooling on Apple’s platforms. The main trade-off is reach: although Swift is open source and runs on Linux and elsewhere, its ecosystem, libraries and tooling are overwhelmingly centred on Apple, so it is far less common off those platforms. In that respect it parallels Kotlin, the modern mobile language tied instead to the JVM and Android.
Where it’s used
Swift is the primary language for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS application development, and for most new software written for Apple’s ecosystem. Outside that world it sees comparatively little use.
Sources
-
Swift (programming language) — Wikipedia, for history and design background. ↩
-
The Swift programming language — official site, documentation, and the language and toolchain. ↩