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Swift

File:Swift_logo.svg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

EntityQ17118377· pop 58· linked from 1,083 articles

Also known as Apple Swift, Swift programming language, Swift language, Swift (Apple programming language), Swiftlang, Swift.org

general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language

Source code

Link to the source-code README · not written by Vinony

Wikidata facts

Has part
LLVM
Creator
Apple Inc.
Developer
Apple Inc.
Official website
www.swift.org
Show 16 more facts
operating system
visionOS
influenced by
D
software version identifier
6.3.1
typing discipline
strong typing
source code repository URL
github.com/swiftlang/swift
Commons category
Swift (programming language)
inception
2014-06-02
copyright license
Apache License
file extension
swift
programming paradigm
declarative programming
media type
text/x-swift
native label
Swift
programmed in
C++
official blog URL
www.swift.org/blog
official forum URL
forums.swift.org
Sources (15)

via Wikidata · CC0

~40 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Swift is a high-level general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language created by Chris Lattner in 2010 for Apple Inc. and maintained by the open-source community. Swift compiles to machine code and uses an LLVM-based compiler. Swift was first released in June 2014 and the Swift toolchain has shipped in Xcode since Xcode version 6, released in September 2014.

Apple intended Swift to support many core concepts associated with Objective-C, notably dynamic dispatch, widespread late binding, extensible programming, and similar features, but in a "safer" way, making it easier to catch software bugs; Swift has features addressing some common programming errors like null pointer dereferencing and provides syntactic sugar to help avoid the pyramid of doom. Swift supports the concept of protocol extensibility, an extensibility system that can be applied to types, structs and classes, which Apple promotes as a real change in programming paradigms they term "protocol-oriented programming" (similar to traits and type classes).

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Swift” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Gallery (2)