Swift Review

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Review of Swift powered by the Slant community.

SpecsUpdate

PlatformsMac, Linux

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Pros

Pro
Modern syntax

Pro
Swift is closer to other platforms

Apple’s modern programming language is easier to understand for non-iOS developers and minimizes time for additional explanations and clarifications. Moreover, Swift can be used as a script language. It is an interesting solution for the iOS community to unify writing of build scripts. At the time being iOS developers are split up in regard to this activity. Some of them write build scripts in Bash, others use Ruby, Python, etc. Swift gives an amazing opportunity to be applied to all iOS programming needs.
More details can be found here https://mlsdev.com/blog/51-7-advantages-of-using-swift-over-objective-c

Pro
Works with Apple's Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks

Pro
Can be used as a Just-In-Time language

Pro
Inherent parallelism

Pro
Low memory footprint due to reference counting

Pro
Backed by Apple

Pro
Performance speed comparable to native C

Pro
Swift has some clever tricks up its sleeve

Due to having elements of a functional programming language. Things like 'map' and 'filter' for example.

Pro
Uses LLVM compiler and Obj-C runtime allowing C, Objective-C, Objective-C++ and Swift code to run side by side within a single program

Cons

Con
Swift is a moving target

They've released 1.2 so far, and 2.0 is coming soon. Every small update brings adjustments to paradigms (such as how to do type casting) that can be a little frustrating to absorb. Objective C was also constantly updating, however, but not at the same rate these days.