Swift - Overview

Swift 4 is a new programming language developed by Apple Inc for iOS and OS X development. Swift 4 adopts the best of C and Objective-C, without the constraints of C compatibility.

• Swift 4 makes use of safe programming patterns.
• Swift 4 provides modern programming features.
• Swift 4 provides Objective-C like syntax.
• Swift 4 is a fantastic way to write iOS and OS X apps.
• Swift 4 provides seamless access to existing Cocoa frameworks.
• Swift 4 unifies the procedural and object-oriented portions of the language.
• Swift 4 does not need a separate library import to support functionalities like input/output or string handling.

Swift 4 uses the same runtime as the existing Obj-C system on Mac OS and iOS, which enables Swift 4 programs to run on many existing iOS 6 and OS X 10.8 platforms.

Swift 4 comes with playground feature where Swift 4 programmers can write their code and execute it to see the results immediately.

The first public release of Swift was released in 2010. It took Chris Lattner almost 14 years to come up with the first official version, and later, it was supported by many other contributors. Swift 4 has been included in Xcode 6 beta.

Swift designers took ideas from various other popular languages such as Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, and CLU.