{"id":242,"date":"2021-04-29T13:06:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-29T12:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.derniercriweb.solutions\/bury-blog\/?p=242"},"modified":"2026-04-07T10:17:04","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T09:17:04","slug":"swift-programming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.derniercriweb.co.uk\/bury-blog\/2021\/04\/29\/swift-programming\/","title":{"rendered":"Swift"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Swift<\/strong> is a general-purpose<\/a>, multi-paradigm<\/a>, compiled<\/a> programming language<\/a> developed by Apple Inc.<\/a> and the open-source community<\/a>, first released in 2014. Swift was developed as a replacement for Apple’s earlier programming language Objective-C<\/a>, as Objective-C had been largely unchanged since the early 1980s and lacked modern language features. Swift works with Apple’s Cocoa<\/a> and Cocoa Touch<\/a> frameworks<\/a>, and a key aspect of Swift’s design was the ability to interoperate with the huge body of existing Objective-C code developed for Apple products over the previous decades. It is built with the open source LLVM<\/a> compiler<\/a> framework and has been included in Xcode<\/a> since version 6, released in 2014. On Apple platforms,[<\/a><\/sup> it uses the Objective-C runtime library<\/a> which allows C<\/a>, Objective-C<\/a>, C++<\/a> and Swift code to run within one program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apple intended Swift to support many core concepts associated with Objective-C<\/a>, notably dynamic dispatch<\/a>, widespread late binding<\/a>, extensible programming<\/a> and similar features, but in a “safer” way, making it easier to catch software bugs<\/a>; Swift has features addressing some common programming errors<\/a> like null pointer<\/a> dereferencing and provides syntactic sugar<\/a> to help avoid the pyramid of doom<\/a>. Swift supports the concept of protocol<\/a> extensibility, an extensibility system that can be applied to types, structs<\/a> and classes<\/a>, which Apple promotes as a real change in programming paradigms they term “protocol-oriented programming”(similar to traits<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Swift was introduced at Apple’s 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference<\/a> (WWDC).[<\/a><\/sup>It underwent an upgrade to version 1.2 during 2014 and a major upgrade to Swift 2 at WWDC 2015. Initially a proprietary language<\/a>, version 2.2 was made open-source software<\/a> under the Apache License<\/a> 2.0 on December 3, 2015, for Apple’s platforms and Linux<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through version 3.0 the syntax of Swift went through significant evolution, with the core team making source stability a focus in later versions. In the first quarter of 2018 Swift surpassed Objective-C<\/a> in measured popularity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Swift 4.0, released in 2017, introduced several changes to some built-in classes and structures. Code written with previous versions of Swift can be updated using the migration functionality built into Xcode. Swift 5, released in March 2019, introduced a stable binary interface on Apple platforms, allowing the Swift runtime to be incorporated into Apple operating systems. It is source compatible with Swift 4.[<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Swift 5.1 was officially released in September 2019. Swift 5.1 builds on the previous version of Swift 5 by extending the stable features of the language to compile-time with the introduction of module stability. The introduction of module stability makes it possible to create and share binary frameworks that will work with future releases of Swift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Swift is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Apple Inc. and the open-source community, first released in 2014. Swift was developed as a replacement for Apple’s earlier programming language Objective-C, as Objective-C had been largely unchanged since the early 1980s and lacked modern language features. Swift works with Apple’s Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks, and a key aspect of Swift’s design was the ability to interoperate with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":247,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[21,23,25,20,19],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-computing","tag-bury","tag-greater-manchester","tag-radcliffe","tag-web-design","tag-web-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.derniercriweb.co.uk\/bury-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.derniercriweb.co.uk\/bury-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.derniercriweb.co.uk\/bury-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.derniercriweb.co.uk\/bury-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.derniercriweb.co.uk\/bury-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.derniercriweb.co.uk\/bury-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.derniercriweb.co.uk\/bury-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.derniercriweb.co.uk\/bury-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.derniercriweb.co.uk\/bury-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.derniercriweb.co.uk\/bury-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}