2014. This was the year that changed everything in the world of iOS application development. Swift was launched and everything has gone uphill ever since. Although the initial response to the language seemed confusing, most of them felt the same, which was that it was too early to put Swift into production.
But all this changed in the very next year. Come 2015, Swift was already the love language of every developer, majorly because Swift was now an open-source code. With every update, it upped the game, offering stability and compatibility that was never seen in the coding world. Fast forward to today, where every major firm is looking to make the best of this technology.
Making use of remote swift developers for the development of your business application can pay off. Overtaking Objective-C in almost every department, the code language Swift has turned heads and proved that it is the best investment that one can opt for. But what difference does it make if a developer makes use of Swift instead of Objective-C?
Key differences between Objective-C and Swift
Objective-C comes off as a general-purpose language that is considered to be the superset of C language which was designed with the aim of providing object-oriented capabilities. On the other hand, Swift is a high-level programming language that focuses on safety and performance.
The former was influenced by C and Smalltalk whereas Swift was influenced by Objective C, Ruby, Python, and Rust and is a static type while Objective C is a dynamic type. Swift only has classes while structs and both classes are in Objective-C.
Both true and false values are offered in Swift. On the other hand, YES and NO values are offered by Objective-C along with BOOl. It offers multiple types of templates when compared to Objective C, while Objective C lacks in that department.
Major perks of hiring a Swift developer
The development process is rapid
Why do most people hire a swift developer? The answer is pretty simple. Swift is pretty easy to read and write, making it a clean and expressive language that comes with a simple syntax and grammar. The language is pretty concise. In simpler terms, one doesn’t need to write a lot of code to perform tasks when compared to Objective-C.
One can take into account the application of the Lyft app. The firm re-wrote the application with Swift. Compared to the old database which consisted of almost 75,000 lines of code, they were able to come up with the same functionality with less than a third of that.
On top of that, the application now had a new onboarding process.
Improved scalability
Apart from a faster development time, users can get their hands on a product that is reliable and in which the addition of new features is easy as you like. All this makes Swift projects easy to scale. This is justified by the fact that Apple supports Swift more than Objective-C, making it the best choice for long-term investment.
To top all this, Swift also allows the option of adding and removing developers as per the need of your project. The onboarding is relatively fast and easy, courtesy of the simplicity of the database.
Better safety, development speed, and overall performance
The initial focus was to improve the performance, speed, and language so as to ensure that it takes on its predecessor and beats it fair and square. And just as everyone expected, the very first launch was 40 percent faster than Objective-C.
With time, several benchmark tests and experiments conducted by developers on an individual level have proven nothing different. To think that’s all would be an understatement since there are plenty of other ways to optimize the performance of Swift even more.
Another major key point of Swift is the safety measures that it offers. The strong typing system and the error handling ensure that the code doesn’t code along with other errors in production. All this implies that Swift has shorter feedback, allowing you to keep tabs on the errors to fix them instantly, further reducing the time and effort that one needs for bug fixation significantly. This eliminates the possibility of the deployment of low-quality code.
Memory footprint reduction
A lot of third-party code is used in the making of an application, meaning that a lot of reusable and open-source framework or library gets compiled into your application’s code. Keep in mind that these can be both static and dynamic, or even shared and it is common knowledge that static libraries are locked into the code during the time of compilation, making them a part of the executable files, also increasing the size and the time is taken to load.
One cannot automatically update the same since they get stuck in the version that you used for compilation. As opposed to that, dynamic libraries do exist outside of the code and get uploaded only when they are needed. Unlike dynamic libraries, static ones need to have all the copies in all files of the particular program. Upon the launch of iOS, Swift came up with the idea of dynamic libraries.
This further means that any application built on such platforms will be smaller, due to the inclusion of these libraries. This advancement has led to the introduction of a stable application binary interface which allows Apple to support Swift across different platforms.
Objective-C interoperability
The major reason why Swift is the future is that it is perfectly compatible with Objective-C and can be used in the same project interchangeably. This comes in pretty handy, especially during large projects that get extended or updated. In such situations, the addition of new features with the use of Swift in the already existing Objective-C becomes pretty easy, further making the porting process easy and risk-free.
Cross-device support and potential for a full stack
The idea of putting the language in the cloud server has been nothing short of brilliant up till now. The use of Swift for both the frontend and backend of the application allows the option of reusability and extensive code sharing which further speeds up the process of development, reducing development efforts.
Open-source community
Slowly and steadily, Swift has become one of the most active and vibrant open source communities by far. Safe to say that it has climbed the ranks to star among the top 5 languages in the machine world.
The ARC feature for automatic memory management
A technology that adds a garbage collector feature, something that iOS users have never seen before. Plenty of languages including the likes of Java, Go, and C# make use of garbage collectors to delete the class instances that are no longer of use. This helps in decreasing the memory footprint but the downside is that it can add up to 20 percent more CPU.
Before this feature, swift iOS developers had to manage all the memory manually while trying to retain the count of every class. This feature simply determines which instances are no longer of use and eliminates them on your behalf. In a nutshell, the feature increases the performance of the application without any side effects.
Tips to be the ideal Swift developer (Bonus)
Make use of protocols
One can sort out a lot of things just by making good use of the protocols that are available in Swift. With the use of protocols, it becomes easy for one to design and establish behaviors of the components of the software, making sure that they are compatible with certain implementations.
Improve readability and move to refactor
The refactoring feature has improved a lot over the years, courtesy of xcode11. The new xcode11 is pretty much more affordable when it comes to refactoring actions, further making it easy for users to rename classes, references, and methods.
Marks, Pragma marks
Everyone has loved the concept of marks ever since the era of Objective-C. Marks became a compulsion ever since people started seeing hundreds of code lines. This makes it important to split and manage all the portions of code with labels to make it easier to navigate the code.
