Programming with Swift for iOS !

What is swift?

• A new programming language for iOS and OSX app development.
• Adopts modern programming patterns and features to make programming easier and flexible.
• Provides seamless access to existing Cocoa frameworks and mix-and-match interoperability with Objective-C code.
• First industrial-quality systems programming language that is as expressive and enjoyable as a scripting language.

New in swift

• Support for functional programming patterns like maps and filters.
• Structs support protocols, methods and extensions.
• Support for Generics and optionals.
• Support for tuples and hence functions that can return multiple values.

Why use swift?

• About 2.8X faster than objective C.
• A compiled programming language with syntax similar to scripting languages.
• Improved readability over other languages by removing extraneous parenthesis and semi colons.
• Enums and control flows have been vastly improved.

Tools Needed

• Needs Apple LLVM 6.0 for compilation, which is shipped with Xcode 6.0.
• Uses the same runtime as existing Objective-C system on Mac OS and iOS.
• Backward compatible up-to iOS 7.0.

Introduction to “Playground”

• A new type of file that allows you to test out Swift code, and see the results of each line in the sidebar.
• Results appear on the sidebar as soon as any code is typed.
• Great way to learn about Swift, to experiment with new APIs, to prototype code or algorithms.

Objective C Vs Swift

• Closures: Closures are self-contained blocks of functionality that can be passed around and used in your code. Closures in Swift are similar to blocks in C and Objective-C.
• AnyObject: The equivalent of ‘id’ from Objective C, is ‘AnyObject’ in swift.
• Introspection: The equivalent of doing if ([obj isKindOfClass:[NSString class]]) { ... }) in swift is if obj is String.