The Future of iOS Development: Evaluating the Swift Programming Language

Swift is a new programming language developed by Apple for creating iOS and Mac OS X applications. Intended to eventually replace Objective-C as Apple’s language of choice, Swift needs to convince developers to switch over to the new language. Apple has promised that Swift will be faster than Objective-C, as well as offer more modern language features, be very safe, and be easy to learn and use. In this thesis I test these claims by creating an iOS application entirely in Swift as well as benchmarking two different algorithms. I find that while Swift is faster than Objective-C, it does not see the speedup projected by Apple. I also conclude that Swift offers many advantages over Objective-C, and is easy for developers to learn and use. However there are some weak areas of Swift involving interactions with Objective-C and the strictness of the compiler that can make the language difficult to work with. Despite these difficulties Swift is overall a successful project for Apple and should attract new developers to their platform