What Are The Amazing Features Of Swift For iOS App Development?

Swift is a new programming language for iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS mobile applications development. It is developed on the best parts of Objective-C and C language without being constrained by its compatibility. This language has adopted safe patterns for iOS app development by delivering more features in order make programming easier and flexible for Swift app developers.

The Swift language is laid by advancing existing compiler, debugger and structural framework of Objective-C. Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) feature is used in Swift programming in order to simplify the memory management issues. The Swift framework stack is built upon modern and standard Cocoa Foundation.

Generally, Swift seems friendly to app developers who have used Objective-C before. Swift has inherited ability of dynamic object model found in Objective-C. It offers easy access to current Cocoa framework along with interoperability with the code of Objective-C.

Using such mutual environment, Swift allows many new features and compatibility with procedural and object-oriented features of Objective-C. Apple has introduced Swift with the vision to create a suitable language that vary from mobile applications to desktop. The mobile applications that are developed with Swift are easily scaled to the cloud services.

Swift language has the power to create responsive, immersive and consumer-facing iOS applications. This all has become possible because of its advanced feature.

Following are the amazing features of Swift programming:

Advanced Memory Management:

In Objective-C, ARC is supported within the object-oriented code and Cocoa APIs. However, it is not available for APIs like Core Graphics and procedural C code. And hence, it becomes developer’s responsibility to handle memory management.

With the support of ARC, Swift developers can manage the memory easily while working with Core APIs and other low-level APIs available on iOS platform.

While coding the iOS application with Objective-C, the digital object is created for every memory allocation. And most of the times developers face the major problem of memory leakage. In Swift, ARC handles all memory management at the time of code compilation. This will help developers to focus more on core logic of application rather than memory management.

Swift Is Faster:

Swift language eliminated the C and Objective-C conventions which have improved the efficiency of application development. The use of Xcode in Swift has improved the speed of execution of GEMM- a memory-bound algorithm. This algorithm sequentially accesses the larger arrays used in source code. Hence, the application delivers the predictable behavior and consistent performance.

Swift also offers syntaxes that are easy to use. These syntaxes provide the features as per the expectation of developers. So developers do not face any difficulties while using them in application coding.

Dynamic Libraries

Many developers have not paid enough attention towards major change in Swift language which is a switch from static libraries to dynamic libraries. Swift get updated to dynamic libraries during the release of Apple’s iOS 8 version. Dynamic libraries are the executable block of source code that can be connected to an app. Dynamic libraries allow developers to link current iOS applications with the latest version of Swift language.

Developers can now submit the application in AppStore along with dynamic libraries. Both app and libraries are digitally signed with development certificate to confirm the integrity. This means that Swift applications can expand faster than iOS. Necessary changes to the libraries can be added with the latest update of an application. Dynamic libraries reduce the size of an application whenever it loads into memory. Because the external code is linked with the app only when it is necessary.

Easy To Maintain

In Objective-C developers need to operate two code files at the execution time of an application. This help to improve the efficiency and build time of an application. But, Swift programs files are even easier to maintain.

The LLVM and Xcode compiler of Swift automatically control the dependencies in a program to perform the incremental build. Swift basically merges header (.h) and implementation (.m) files of Objective-C. Hence Swift app developers do not need to handle two separate files for execution of source code.

Swift Package Managers:

Apple has provided Swift bundle directors to sort the applications. Swift package managers can track the various activities applications running on different devices. For example, Mac OS X, Linux, watchOS, and tvOS.