Swift is a programming language from Apple for iOS, macOS, TVOS, watchOS and Linux, on the developer conference WWDC 2014 was presented. It is a multiparadigmatic language that incorporates the ideas of Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, D and other programming languages. It provides mechanisms such as classes, inheritance, closures, type inference, higher order functions, generic types and namespaces, and multiple return types and values. The Compiler based on LLVM.
At the conference, the associated manual was announced and made available on the iBooks Store. According to Swifts chief architect, Chris Lattner, Swift Objective-C should not replace Apple, but provide an additional opportunity for development for the platforms iOS and macOS.
The development of Swift began in July 2010 by Chris Lattner, from the end of 2011, worked on a larger development team. A WWDC app update released June 2, 2014 was the first published application written in Swift.
Swift 1: Swift 1.0 was released on September 9, 2014 by Apple. On this day the Golden Master was distributed by Swift 1 incl. Xcode 6.1.
Swift 2: At WWDC 2015 on June 8, 2015, Apple introduced Swift 2.0. In addition to various language enhancements such as the exception handling means try, throw and catch was also announced that the license is changed by Swift into an OSI-compliant open source license. On December 3 2015, Apple introduced then Swift under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows free use of Swift (also for commercial projects). Apple released the source code in a GitHub repository and also offers a port for Linux.
Swift 3: At WWDC 2016, Swift 3.0 was released together with iOS 10.0. Swift 3 is the first new major release since Apple Swift made it open source. With some major changes, Swift 3 is no longer source code compliant with the previous versions. The reason for this is above all the new API design guidelines, which form the basis for the further development of Swift and for which clarity or clarity should be particularly important. The list of new features and upgrades in Swift 3.0 includes more than 100 points. Apple has published a migration guide to help with the transition. For Xcode 8.0, there is a "code migrator" for customizing existing code that will automate most of the changes needed.
Swift 4: In September 2017, Swift 4 released the next major release. New features include improved collection types and easier handling of strings. To be able to continue using existing Swift-3 code, the compiler has a Swift 3 and Swift 4 mode, which can also be used together in a project.
