Posts tagged "Comparing Swift to Objective-C"

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iOS Development: Comparing Swift to Objective-C

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iOS Development: Comparing Swift to Objective-C

Swift is a general-purpose, compiled, high-level programming that came into existence in 2014 at Apple. It was developed to replace Objective-C and shares many features with it.

In this article, we will be looking at Swift and Objective-C to decide which one is best for your next iOS project.

1. Interoperability

Swift and Objective-C are interoperable, which means you can have the same codebase for your iOS app.  Objective-C being derived from C means it can interoperate with it. Also, you can use the extended libraries of C and C++ with Objective-C, which is not the case with Swift. But as mentioned earlier, Swift is interoperable with Objective-C.

Overall, the winner is Objective-C in this aspect.

2. Speed

Swift is 2.6 times faster than Objective-C, as claimed by Apple. This is due to simpler syntax and compile-time error fixing.

3. Development Environment

The same IDE can be used to develop iOS apps in both Swift and Objective-C, in this case, XCode.

4. Syntax

Swift was developed to be a modern programming language.  Swift allows for automatic type inference, which means it requires fewer type declarations than Objective-C. Its syntax is more concise than Objective-C, which makes code easier to maintain and more readable.

5. Memory Use

Memory management works better in Swift since it uses Automatic Reference Counting(ARC), which means that you don’t have to bother with memory management yourself. This allows the freeing of memory when a class instance is no longer needed, whether you are in an object-oriented or procedural path.

Objective-C developers must be more cautious when managing memory, as ARC is only available in Cocoa API. Core graphics API doesn’t use ARC on the other end.

 6. Scalability

Swift offers better scalability than Objective-C. This ensures that your app will maintain performance in case of increased workload demand without the need to change the app. Clear syntax and object-oriented programming make adding features to your app easy.

Objective-C has a more tedious syntax making it difficult to write new features.

7. Community

Swift’s community is open-source. Resources are easily available to develop your projects.

Final Words

Of the two languages, Swift offers the most concise, easiest, and fastest way to build apps. It also uses less memory than Objective-C and is more secure since the risk of doing mistakes is lower.