Definition of Swift

Swift is a programming language that is multi-paradigm, general-purpose, and compiled. This language was specifically developed for macOS, iOS, tvOS, Linux, watchOS.

The language was created by Apple Incorporation and is designed with the aim of working with Cocoa Touch, Cocoa frameworks and an extensive set of Objective-C codes that have been written for the products of Apple Incorporation.

History of Swift

Chris Lattner began the development of Swift in the year 2010 and collaborated with other programmers at Apple in the course of the development of this language. The language ideas for Swift were taken from Rust, Objective-C, Ruby, Haskell, C#, CLU, Python, and a range of other programming languages.

The release of Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) application in the year 2014, marked the formal introduction of an app written in Swift. During the conference, Apple released a prototype of the language and made it available to the registered Apple developers. The company, however, did not promise that the finalized version will be exactly like the prototype. Apple also planned to develop some source code converters for the final release.

A manual of 500 page – called The Swift Programming Language – was also provided to the developers at the conference for free. It is also available of iBook and official website of Apple Incorporation.

The 1.0 Swift was released on the 9th of September 2014. The company also introduced the Gold Master of Xcode 6.0 for iOS side by side with this release. Swift 1.1 was introduced, along with the Xcode 6.1, on 22nd of October 22, 2014. The range of developments continued till the introduction of Swift 2.0 at WWDC 2015.

The company also introduced a rough framework for the development of Swift 3.0 on a blog on December 2015. The introduction of an intermittent version was made prior to the 3.0. Swift 2.2 – the intermittent version – introduced new features and syntax in the language. Some outdated components were also eliminated from the language with this version.

According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2015 Swift gained first stand as the Most Loved Programming Language. The language maintained the second place in the 2016 survey. Because of the ever increasing functionality and popularity of Swift, it is said that Google is considering to use Swift as the primary programming language for Android, which is the operating system of Google.

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