When comparing Ruby (via Opal) vs Swift, the Slant community recommends Ruby (via Opal) for most people. In the question“What are the best languages that compile to JavaScript? ” Ruby (via Opal) is ranked 16th while Swift is ranked 46th. The most important reason people chose Ruby (via Opal) is:
Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters. presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"] for ss in 0...presidents.length print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n"; end
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Elegant syntax
Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters.
presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"]
for ss in 0...presidents.length
print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n";
end
Pro Popular
Ruby is one of the most popular languages for developing web sites. As a result, there's an abundant amount of documentation, sample code, and libraries available for learning the language and getting your project up and running. The most popular features are just 'gem install' away.
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 Meta-programming causes confusion for new developers
The ability for libraries to open classes and augment them leads to confusion for new developers since it is not clear who injected the functionality into some standard class.
In other words, if two modules decide to modify the same function on the same class can introduce a number of issues. Mainly, the order in which the modules are included matters. Since you more or less can't tell what kind of "helper" functions a module might write into any class, or for that matter, where the helper function was included from, you may sometimes wonder why class X can do Y sometimes but not at other times.
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.