5 Reasons Apple’s Swift is a Hit Among Developers

It’s been just about two weeks since Apple unveiled Swift, and the initial buzz about Swift has been nearly palpable.

Swift earned the loudest applause during WWDC as Apple surprised developers with a new replacement for the decade-old Objective-C language.  You can find the free 500-page Swift Programming Language book here.

Now that the initial shock has dialed down a little…is Swift living up to the hype?  Some developers on Stack Overflow have tested the new language and pointed to initial performance issues. But, seeing as it’s still in Beta, a verdict may be too soon to call.

This article highlights some of the top most promising features that mark a new era of app development:

1. Easier Syntax Allows You to Develop Quickly

Swift pulls a lot from other languages, so it should be more intuitive and developer-friendly.

"There’s less of the fiddly little housekeeping stuff that you have to do in more traditional languages,” says Brent Simmons, one of three developers at Vesper, a note-taking iPhone app told GeekWire.

Just look at Nate Murray, cofounder of Fullstack.io, who created a Swift implementation of the addictive game Flappy Bird--in just four hours!

“Swift is surprisingly fantastic, especially for a language that's been developed in secret for years,” Murray tells Fast Co. Labs. “It has the functional programming features that folks like the Ruby community will like, coupled with performance features lower-level programmers demand. And [it’s] fast--surprisingly fast, even to compile.”

Here's a quick 15-minute tutorial to get started by Ray Wenderlich. 

2. Swift Supports Type Inference

In line with No. 1, Swift's type inference reduces typing time for developers. 

“If you fail to declare a variable type, but set it to be one that’s already declared, ten Swift infers that it’s the declared type,” Simon Bisson of Cite World explains in a recent post. This makes your code resistant to crashes.

This is just one of many new features introduced in Swift.

"Some of the notable features are the inclusion of closures, classes, extensions (comparable to C# extension methods) and generics (C#/Java and other languages use generics)," says Cole Chamberlain, senior software developer at CyberCoders. "Where objective-c feels clunky, swift feels modern."

Here's a great list of features via iPhone developer and instructor Ray Wenderlich.

3. Swift Can Coexist with Objective-C

Although Swift is a brand new language, Swift and Objective-C can coexist in the same source. This is important because it makes for easier adoption.

“You can mix and match Swift and Objective-C code in the same app, so you can reuse existing libraries in new apps,” Cite World reports. “There's no need to rewrite code you want to reuse.”

4. Swift’s Interactive Playground Feature Lets You Play Around with Code

You can actually see exactly what your code does inside the IDE thanks to the new, innovative Playground feature.

“Xcode 6's Playgrounds will let developers quickly try out sections of code to see if they do what they want without leaving the IDE,” Bisson writes. “There's no need to compile code, run builds or debuggers, it's all there next to the code you've just written.”

5. Swift will Cut Down on App Store Approvals Process

Since Swift aims to get rid of risky programming structures (Re: No. 2), the App Store approval process will be faster.

“Apps written in Swift won’t need the same rigorous tests as those written in Objective-C, allowing increased automation, making it quicker for apps (and, more importantly, updates) to arrive in the App Store,” Bisson writes.

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