Swift
lastmod 2025-06-10created 2014-06-055 edits
(For SWIFT, meaning the "Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication", see this page)
Swift is a programming language for Apple's iOS and macOS, first introduced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 2, 2014. In the early days after its announcement, Swift's syntax was said to be the Python language. It was created to be used alongside Objective-C, the existing language for Apple's operating systems.
Like Objective-C, it is built with LLVM and shares the same runtime. It includes many features of modern programming languages that Objective-C lacked, such as closures, multiple return types, namespaces, generics, and type inference. You can mix C or Objective-C code within your code, or program interactively in real time like a scripting language. A language guide was released alongside it. Apple distributes a book about Swift on iBooks. Going from version 2.0 to 3.0, many changes were made, such as removing many C-style for loops and the ++ and -- operators, so it is not backward compatible. It can be used in Xcode.
See also
- swiftly - Swift version management tool
- Containerization - Swift package for running Linux containers on macOS