Objective-C and Swift programming languages for mobile application developments became one of the hottest programming languages trends in the recent era. Both Objective-C and Swift are different enough from C, C++, and Java that it will take a programmer familiar with those languages (or their many descendants) a little time to come up to speed, but of the two I believe Swift will be easier to pick up and use. I found Objective-C to be clunky, and Swift to be quite elegant.
Selecting the most appropriate language depends on the project and team context, as well as preference to a particular programming language. In my opinion, if you want to create new modern apps, Swift should be a better choice.
Swift has some advantages and disadvantages, but the main reason for choosing it for your future app is the devotion of progressive developers to it. Swift is fast, safe, modern, and enables a level of interactivity in development. It contains several features such as closures, generics, and type inference that make it much easier to use, simplifying common patterns used in Objective-C. Swift will not only supersede Objective-C for iOS app development but will also replace C for embedded programming on Apple platforms. Swift takes a lot of useful components from Objective-C while also bringing a whole new host of features, allowing developers to write safer, more reliable code. It has quickly become the leading programming language for creating engaging, user-friendly mobile apps.
What is Objective-C?
With the inbuilt feature of the Smalltalk messaging style messaging to C programming language, Objective-C is an object-oriented programming language used by Apple for this specific purpose. In 1996 Apple acquired NeXT, and developers started using Objective-C as their primary programming language. These tools were later included in Xcode. That’s how Apple began using Objective-C for Mac OS X development. This owes the genesis of Objective C as the first-choice language for everybody to create applications based on OS X and iOS.
What is Swift?
Swift is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language. It was created by Apple and introduced at its Worldwide Developers Conference in 2014. The language has been vastly developed since that time. Swift is a robust and intuitive programming language that quickly become one of the fastest-growing languages in history that’s easy to learn, simple to use, and super powerful.
Despite the growing popularity of both these languages, Apple Swift has a competitive edge over its rival Objective-C in a few areas such as type safety, security, and better on-hardware performance.
A few key advantages of Swift include:
# Swift is better for iOS development
With much cleaner & expressive syntax, better usability, and shorter development cycles, Apple Swift becomes a perfect choice for building iOS Apps of any kind & for any device. To put it in simple words, Apple built Swift programming language with a futuristic vision to enhance the iOS App Development process for many years to come. These distinctive features propounded great expectations for this language and became the topic for numerous Swift vs Objective-C arguments for developing mobile applications.
# Clarity of Code
As compared to Objective-C, iOS Swift code can be implemented with less code with a string of manipulations. In Objective-C, the associated issues such as messed up orders or wrong string tokens could lead to app crashes. However, Swift code obviates such issues with the help of built-in inline support designed to manipulate text strings and data. Also, with the help of the Swift programming language, developers are able to figure out the simple syntax of this language intended to make it safe, easier to read, and easier to learn.
# Better Compilation Experience for Programmers
The inbuilt Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) in Swift enables to the compilation of languages like Scala, Ruby, Python, C#, and Go in much faster and smarter ways as compared to Objective C compilers. In turn, Swift makes substantially drops down the workload by transferring the work from the programmer to Xcode and the compiler.
# Better Memory Management
“Memory leaks” are the common pitfalls in object-oriented programming and apps that can decrease the available memory for an app to run causing the application to crash. On the other hand, Swift is integrated with Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) provides a quick fix for in-store references into memory, and helps clean up when it is not being used. It focuses on memory management and provides stability that is less time for programmers to integrate coding for application development.
