Swift is now our default choice for development in the Apple ecosystem. With the release of Swift 2, the language approached a level of maturity that provides the stability and performance required for most projects. A good number of libraries that support iOS development—SwiftyJSON, Quick, etc.—are now migrated over to Swift, which is where the rest of the applications should follow. Swift has now been open sourced, and we are seeing a community of developers dedicated to continuously improving development in iOS.
A year after its public debut, Swift is now our default choice for development in the Apple ecosystem. With the recent release of Swift 2, the language approaches a level of maturity that provides the stability and performance required for most projects. Swift still has issues, especially around tool support, refactoring and testing. However, we feel that these are not substantial enough to warrant avoiding Swift. At the same time, porting large, existing Objective-C codebases is unlikely to pay off. The announcement that Swift will become open source software is a further positive sign. We are hopeful that this will not just be another dumping of internally developed code into a public repository, because Apple has clearly stated that community contributions are encouraged and will be accepted.
With some real-world experience under our belt, Swift still shows a lot of promise. Some of the problems, like long compile times, are being addressed. However, continued language changes cause extra development effort and make building older versions of your own software burdensome. Testing and refactoring also remain painful. On balance, though, you should still consider Swift when starting new development projects for the Apple ecosystem.
Swift, Apple’s new development language, contains many improvements over the perennial Objective-C, including emphasis on functional programming and modern syntax. In most ways, this is an upgrade if you are coding on the Apple platform.
