tutorial 2 swift - overview

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

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

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

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

It took almost 14 years to bring the first public release of the Swift language starting from 2010 by Chris Lattner and later supported by many other contributors. and later a great collaboration of many other programmers. Swift has been included in Xcode 6 beta.

Swift designers took ideas from various other popular languages like Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list.