Swift was born after realizing that many programmers find it difficult to code in Objective-C because of the neophyte’s atangle pointers, file handling, and punctuation-rich syntax. Announced at the World Wide Developers Conference in June 2014, Swift has taken the place of Objective-C to work with Apple’s Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks and a large portion of the existing Objective-C code written for Apple products. Chris Latner – Initial author of the LLVM (Lower Virtual Machine) project, began developing in 2010 in collaboration with many other programmers. It has taken ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C #, CLU and many more. With the newly introduced language, Apple hopes that programmers who have learned Java, JavaScript or Ruby will find many similarities in Swift that will help them master the language without much difficulty.

The basic structure of Swift is similar to that of Java. The whole code is divided into classes consisting of fields and methods. What sets it apart from Java is the announcement of syntax and other simplified features. For example, a function declaration begins with a keyword (func) and returns after the name of the return value method, unlike Java. The WWDC app is the first publicly published app written in Swift. Apple launched version 1.0 of the Swift in September 2014 with the Golden Master of Xcode 6.0 for iOS. Apple isn’t killing Objective-C, it will stay with Swift. Many older developers will stick to Objective-C instead of learning a completely new language which they already know how to do. Swift aims to attract newcomers.

Apple is highlighting important features of Swift at WWDC14

Significance

Apple calls it “Objective-C without C”. It’s simpler and easier to use than Objective-C. A new programming language takes years to develop into a large community and is no secret. Swift, of course, has a different story here. Due to its simplicity and the ever-increasing rank of iOS and OS X developers, it could gain widespread acceptance at an unprecedented pace. Swift is expected to surpass Sun Microsoft’s Java programming language and Microsoft’s C # adoption in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Swift is not as attractive as popular programming languages ​​like Ruby, Python and C #. Its only advantage is its simplicity over Objective-C which uses the style of the mid-80s, which is not easy to use as a modern programming language. Swift has come up with a new tool called “Playground”, which lets you view writing programs that enable you to learn code. With Swift you don’t have to waste time and keystrokes specifying the type of each variable; The compiler will guess it from the beginning.

Then and there the code uses the playground to see the results.

Apart from this there are some interesting and unusual features like: –

Multiple return values – Swift allows multiple return values ​​for a function. Looking at it differently, it only provides a single value which is a tipple that can be changed during runtime.

Generic – Like Java, Swift also supports generic classes and functions.

Class Like the structure – Swift supports structures and classes in the same way as Objective-C. However, one way to keep Swift apart is to provide support for structural functions.

Follower off – A new feature that adds closures at the end of code that makes it sort of more natural.

Operator overloading – In addition to the default operator, Swift lets you overload new characters from a limited set of characters.

Library

GitHub’s popular Swift libraries include:
Swiftz – for functional programming that defines fully functional data structures and functions. Download here
ReactKit – for responsive programming in Swift. Download here
Alamofire – for elegant HTTP networking in Swift. Download here
Animated Tab Bar – Animated tab bar is a Swift module for animating the contents of the tab bar. Download here
Quick – Swift Testing Framework. Download here
FlappySwift – Flappy Bird implementation in Swift. Download here
Swift – Written in Swift, a Twitter framework for iOS and OS X. Download here
Chat – An open source native iPhone messaging app. Download here
SwiftWeather – Swift has created a weather app for iOS. Download here
There are very few libraries available for Swift compared to other programming languages. This newly published language needs more developers to match other popular languages

Libraries and frameworks generate reusable code.

Tools and resources

Apple’s new language is in Apple’s ecosystem. Developments for Apple products always happen in Apple’s environment, and Swift is no exception. To develop Swift you need a Mac based computer running OS X Yosemite. Like Objective-C, Swift develops using the Xcode IDE. Apple has announced Xcode 6 with Swift support this year. Unlike other programming languages, no alternative IDE is available at this time. If you have a Mac, you can go to the App Store and download Xcode 6 for free. The newly introduced language has a lot of learning resources. Many websites offer free as well as paid resources that include tutorials and articles. In addition, StackOverflow has also been flooded with questions related to Swift.

Apples
Apple has released the ebook “The Swift Language Reference” for free on the iTunes Store. Alternatively, you can get your hands on the same ebook in HTML format on Apple’s website.

SoSoSwift
SoSoSwift is a great website dedicated to the Swift language. This is an index that brings Swift tutorials across the Internet.

Block
Block offers free tutorials that will guide you to create your first 2D game on Swift using the Spire Kit.

LearnSwift
LearnSwift has a curated list of resources for learning Swift, including tutorials, code samples, code libraries and references.

Using Xcode 6 to develop an iOS app with Swift language.

Ray Wenderlich
Ray Wonderlich is a popular website that offers iOS development tutorials. With the introduction of the new language, the website has updated its database with tutorials that cover the basics of the language as well as simple apps written in Swift using various iOS frameworks.

Swift Objective-C class
If you’re interested in using the old Objective-C classes in Swift, this is a step-by-step guide to creating a bridging header.

Higher order function in Swift
Learn all about Swift shutdowns and how they can be used to filter, create maps, and reduce sequence operations.