Swift Tutorial

Swift is an object-oriented, functional, compiled programming language for developing IOS, OS X, tvOS, watchOS applications. Swift is based on Apple Inc. software design pattern, safety and research. Soon Swift became one of the top 5 programming languages and popular for developing applications for IOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS.

In recent years it’s preferred over Objective C. Swift code very runs fast and it’s safe. Its learning curve is fast and developers can learn it fast. Swift is included in Xcode since version 6 and built with open source LLM compiler. Swift uses the Objective-C runtime library so that it can run C, Objective-C, C++ and Swift code to run within one program.

Why do we need to learn Swift?

Swift became one of the most used languages to create applications for IOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS. Currently IOS and Android have major market shares in the mobile operating system and nowadays everyone wants to have a mobile application for their users. Any new service says ecommerce, fintech applications all want to have mobile applications so that users can download them and use the service anytime with better interactions and mobile applications are a more convenient way to reach users. Most people in the world are using smartphones and wants all their services on the phone although you can have a mobile website to reach all the customer recently mobile applications usage is more than the mobile web and mobile applications usage would increase in future.

Now we got to know how important is mobile application presence for a company nowadays and everybody is developing mobile applications nowadays. It makes important to learn swift so that we can develop a mobile application for the IOS platform, macOS, watchOS or tvOS.

Applications of Swift

We have already discussed a lot about swift how it can help you to develop an IOS application, watchOS application, tvOS application, and macOS. There can be another case where you have your payment gateway or some other service for which you want to develop an SDK or library that can be integrated into any mobile application and your service will get integrated.

Example

Suppose you have a shop which is famous but due to overcrowding in peak hours you are not able to serve all the customers properly where some are old who only want particular things and some are the new one who wants to see different things. A solution to this problem could be developed an order application where customers can see products or book the products that they want and you will get the orders on your server and you can delivery than at their doorstep. To develop an Iphone application you need to develop your application in swift and then put that app on the app store and your customers can download that app and use that for ordering.

Another case could be you are a well-established payment gateway and other companies want to have your payment gateway in their current mobile application. One way could be to develop and native SDK that can be integrated by different developers to integrate your payment gateway in their existing application. For supporting IOS you need to develop the application in swift language.

Prerequisites

There are certain things you should know before starting your application development in Swift.

Basic understanding of computer programming terminologies.
Any programming language exposure

Introduction to Install Swift

Swift is a programming language that is use to build applications with good performance, security, and software design patterns. It has a lot of features that make code easier to read and write. Also one of the best languages to develop mobile and desktop applications. It is mainly develop to make the life of developers easy with new features.

Swift was design and developed by Apple Inc. It first appeared in the year 2014. It is based on static, strong and inferred typing discipline. The file name extension of the file is ‘.swift’. It has widespread late binding and extensible programming features. there is no need of putting a semicolon (;) at the end of each statement, no header files are need, it requires type inference. is a generic programming language. It is platform independent and does support many platforms. It support categories and methods which can be use to extend the classes at runtime. Also uses interfaces to support multiple inheritances.

Steps To Install Swift

The details about the installation are as follow:

Step 1: Download the installer and its components. To download, please use this link https://www.swift.org/download/#releases

Step 2: After downloading, double click on the installer. The following screen will open

Step 3: After completing the above set of instructions, the installation is complete. After that launch the Xcode and choose toolchain option to select development language as below:

For MacOS:

The default location for toolchain on Mac and it can be install through the terminal with the command

$ export TOOLCHAINS=swift

For Linux:

Install, clang: $ sudo apt-get install clang

The actual path for installation is:

$ export PATH=/path/to/Swift/usr/bin: “%{PATH}”

Features of Swift

The feature of Swift is to work together to make the language more powerful and the features that swift include:

Generics
Multiple return values and tuples
In-built error handling
Closures unified and function pointer
Structs that support method, protocols, and extensions
Advanced control flow
Functional programming patterns.
Fast and concise iteration over range or collection.

The other feature for swift is safety. It was design to be safer than other languages and to eliminate the other unsafe code. Also helps in managing the memory automatically. It is tune to make it easy to define the intent. The important feature is that swift object cannot be nil otherwise it throws compile time error. It makes the coding easier, cleaner and safer and prevents the run time crashes. It is being referr to as the protocol-oriented programming as well.

The swift is open source and easily available as the code is easily available on GITHUB. It is being maintain by the larger community support of swift developers and continues increasing the performance of swift. The most exciting thing about swift is it is open to any platform, means it can be port across the wide range of platforms and devices.

In Swift, it supports strings fully with Unicode. There is no exception handling, it has its own different compatible model for handling errors. In swift, the enumeration classes can have data associate with it and the new operators can be define for the classes or operators. There is no need to use the break statement in switch blocks. The variables and constants are always initialize and checked the bound arrays.

Swift code consist of the following

Following are the code below mentioned:

1. Safe

The swift code should be written in a safe manner. The swift makes it strict safety for the developer to write the code in a proper manner and as per the standards of the programming language.

2. Fast

It is develop to replace the objective-c language and C language. comparable to the languages in terms of performance for most of the tasks. Also being observe that performance is predictable and consistent. It is fast and quick. Its applications are getting loaded at a faster rate.

3. Expressive

Swift code is more expressive and easy to read and use. It is easy to learn with modern features to use. It is getting better and better over the years with its latest versions.

Conclusion

The swift is the widely used programming language for the developers. It is easily available and to use. modern features with its latest versions to do the programming for the different types of application to provide the features to the user. one can easily learn it if an individual knows C language. with great online community and good documentation on the official site for the latest version and use of features. It is being explained very well and the continuous support of third-party libraries. The details about the installation have been provided above to install it in a quick manner and start developing an application.