Category Archives: SWIFT PROGRAMMING

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN SWIFT PROGRAMMING

Latest Developments in Swift Programming

In our previous articles, we have explained, what Swift programming is, it’s features, and also the difference between Swift and Objective-C. We know the technology is growing at a faster rate, the developments are done at an exponential rate. In this article, we are going to talk about the latest developments in Swift programming language.

We know Swift 2.2 is almost here. It cleans up a number of quirks and added some missing features. So let us talk about the major and the minor changes in Swift so that you can run straight away to it.

Latest Developments in Swift Programming

THE DEVELOPMENTS IN SWIFT PROGRAMMING
++ and – – are deprecated
Swift 2.2 deprecates the ++ and – – operators, which means they still work but a user gets a warning message when he uses them. Deprecation is done for the first time towards removing something entirely, in this case, both of these operators will be removed in Swift 3.0.
In the place of ++ and –, a user needs to use += 1 and -= 1.

You might wonder why two long-standing operators has been removed, when they exist in C, C#, Java, and C++. There are several reasons for this question, but let’s see the major reasons for its removal.

* Writing ++ rather than += 1 is more time saving.
* ++ doesn’t have an obvious meaning to the people who are learning Swift, whereas += at least reads as “add and assign”.

Traditional C-style loops are deprecated

Loops like below will soon be removed from Swift.
for var i = 1; i <= 10; i += 1 {
print(“\(i) green bottles”)
}

These are called C-style loops. They have been from a very long time in languages like C. Although, Swift is a C-like language, it has a number of newer and smarter alternatives to replace this traditional loops.

To replace this traditional loops a user can use any one of the many alternatives. For instance, the above-written code can also be re-written to loop over a range, like this:

var array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
for number in array {
print(“\(number) green bottles”)

Arrays and slice types now have removeFirst()

The removeLast() has been always helpful while working with arrays. Now we have the missing counterpart to remove the items from the beginning of the array. Swift 2.2 has introduced the new feature removeFirst() method. This removes the first element in an array and returns it to the user.

Renamed debug identifiers: #line, #function, and #file

Swift 2.1 earlier was using “snake case” symbols __File__, __Line__, __Column__, and __Function__, which automatically gets replaced by the compiler as the File name, Line number, Column number, and Function name when they appear.

Swift 2.1 earlier was using “snake case” symbols __File__, __Line__, __Column__, and __Function__, which automatically gets replaced by the compiler as the File name, Line number, Column number, and Function name when they appear.

VAR PARAMETERS HAVE BEEN DEPRECATED

Another deprecation in the list is, var parameters are deprecated because they offer only minimal usefulness.

func printGreeting(var name: String, repeat repeatCount: Int) {
name = name.uppercaseString
for _ in 0 ..< repeatCount {
print(name)
}
}
printGreeting(“Taylor”, repeat: 5)

Now the difference is, the name is now var name and name gets converted to uppercase so that “TAYLOR” will be printed out for five times.

Without the var keyword, the name would have been constant and the upper string line would be failed.

Developments in Swift Programming

HOW IOS SWIFT PROGRAMMING IS GETTING POPULAR

How IOS Swift programming is getting popular

IOS Swift Programming

Swift is a persuasive and intuitive programming language for iOS, OS X, tvOS, and watchOS. Writing up the swift code is interactive and enjoyable, the syntax is brief yet expressive, and applications run at lightning-fast. Swift is ready for your next project – or addition into your current application – because, the Swift code runs parallel with Objective-C.

INTRODUCING SWIFT:

Swift is a new programming language that builds on the best of C and Objective-C, without the constraints of C compatibility. Swift adopts safe programming patterns and has added more modern features to make programming easier, malleable, and more lively. Swift’s clean slate backed by the mature and much-loved Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks, is an opportunity to reimagine how software development works.

Swift took many years in making. Apple laid the foundation for Swift by progressing the existing compiler, and framework infrastructure. Objective-C itself evolved to support blocks, collection literals, and modules, enabling framework adoption of modern language technologies without any interruption.

As Swift is familiar to Objective-C developers, it adopts readability of Objective-C’s named parameters and the power of Objective-C’s dynamic model. Building from the common ground, Swift introduces many new features and consolidates the procedural and object-oriented portions of the language. Another important feature of Swift is, it allows the programmers to experiment with the Swift code and can see the results immediately, without the overhead of building and running an application.

Swift combines the best of modern language thinking with wisdom from the wider Apple engineering culture. The compiler is optimized for performance and the language is optimized for development, without compromising on anyone either.

According to the Red Monk’s Programming Language rankings, Swift has climbed from 68th position in 2014 to 22nd position in 2015, a jump of 46 slots. According to the meteoric rise, Swift is expected to become a top language sometime in this year.

Swift is a fantastic way to write iOS, OS X, watch OS, and tvOS apps, and will continue to advance with new features and capabilities. It has also gone open source, which is one of the main reason for its popularity.

Swift Programming Language
SYNTAX ENHANCEMENT:

The syntax features make the users write more expressive code while improving consistency across the language. The SDK’s have employed new Objective-C features such as, generics and nullability annotation to make Swift code even cleaner and safer.

TYPES, VARIABLES, AND SCOPING:

Under the environment of Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, many classes were part of the foundation kit library. This includes, NSString string library, the NSArray, and the NSDictionary collection classes. Objective-C provides various bits of syntactic sugar to allow some of the objects to be created within the language. But, once it is created the objects are manipulated within the object calls.

NSString *str = @”hello,”;
str = [str stringByAppendingString:@” world”];

In swift, many of these basic types have been promoted to the language’s core and can be manipulated directly. For instance, strings are invisibly bridged to NSString and can be coupled with the “+” operator allowing simplified syntax.

var str = “hello,”
str += ” world”
INTERACTIVE PLAYGROUNDS:

Playgrounds make writing Swift code astonishingly simple and fun. If a user types a line of the code, the result appears immediately, and a user can have quick look of result which is side of the code, or can pin the result directly below. And in new Xcode 7, playground contains comments that use rich text with, bold, italic, and bullet lists in addition to embedded images and links.

DESIGNED FOR SAFETY:

Swift excludes entire classes of unsafe code. The variables are initialized always before use, arrays and integers are checked for overflow, and memory is managed automatically. Another safety feature of Swift is, by default Swift objects can never be nil. The Swift compiler will stop you from trying to make or use of nil object with a compile-time error. This makes the writing of code much cleaner and safer, and prevents massive category of runtime crashes in your applications.

RAPID AND POWERFUL:

From its earlier concept, Swift was built much faster. Using the high-performance LLVM compiler, Swift code is transformed into optimized native code that gets the most out of modern hardware.

PLATFORM SUPPORT:

One of the most impressive aspects of developing Swift is, it is now free to be ported across wide range of platforms, devices, and use cases.

The major goal is to provide source compatibility for Swift across all platforms, even though the actual implementation and mechanisms may differ from one platform to other.

CONCLUSION:

Swift has all the necessary features to quickly become a popular programming language for iOS and OS X in both the enterprise and the consumer worlds. The type interference characteristic of the language will make it especially suitable for the enterprise and the simple and clean syntax will attract those on consumer projects.