Pros & Cons Of Swift Programming Language

Netsmartz LLC
3 min readJun 27, 2022

Incepted in 2014, Swift has been in the market as a beloved programming language for close to a decade now. It has weathered the love and hate of developers as it progressed to become a cleaner, neater and more clutter-free programming language.

Today, Swift ranks as the 11th most preferred programming language and this ranking comes from the developers who have used it over the years for creating computer programs and mobile applications for iOS, macOS X, and Linux.

Founded by Apple and other open-source contributors, Swift has expanded rapidly since 2014 and has become a haven for the majority of iOS app development projects among developers.

Nevertheless, Swift too has its drawbacks along with its perks which developers haven’t been able to forego and still experience to this day.

Let’s take a look at some of Swift’s pros and cons!

Pros:

  • Open-source: Being open-source is one of Swift’s greatest strengths. The language became open-source by the latter half of 2015, making it a platform where developers can not only work in synergy but also share their inputs and two cents on the language’s development and code.
  • Safe: One of the key facets of Swift as a programming language is its use of syntaxes to encourage error-free codes so as to avoid future hassles and loopholes. Swift can be stringent and rigid while writing codes which makes it all the more safe to use and aids in making fewer mistakes.
  • Quick: Apple claims that Swift enables up to 2.6x faster development than Objective-C and up to 8.4x faster development than Python 2.7. This couldn’t be further from the truth. With its seamless syntaxes and spoon-fed development process, creating an app through Swift can really be a piece of cake.

Cons:

  • Native: Being a native app development language, Swift doesn’t enable the creation of apps on both Android and iOS. Today cross-platform app development frameworks have caught the market in a whirlwind and every developer wants to create codes that they can run on both platforms without taking the load.
  • Compatibility Issues: As Swift rolls out newer updates, the earlier ones immediately become ineffective and unsalvagable. For instance, projects done in 1.0 and 2.0 can no longer be altered, maintained or even ran Swift 3.0.
  • Parched Talent Pool: Due to Swift being a relatively new programming language with a native base, there are not a lot of developers who pick up Swift for their projects. If you are to look for Swift developers, it could well enough be a cumbersome task.

Conclusion:

Weighing Swift’s pros and cons proves that it is here to stay and evolve with more developers taking it up in the near future. You too shouldn’t miss out on some of Swift’s amazing app development features and hire Swift developers for your next application development gig.

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