Top 5 Features of Swift 5 to Consider During iOS App Development

The process of choosing iPhone app development, often leaves developers perplexed. Developers have two choices, either they choose Objective-C or Swift. Nevertheless, objective-C is an ancient programming language compared to Swift, a modern, fast, clear, and evolving programming language.

You might be wondering what the difference between Objective-C and Swift is. So the only difference is their age. In contrast, Objective-C is a classic standoff age and experience versus youth and many resources. Even though both are for a common purpose, their approaches to programming differ. Hence, Objective-C is object-oriented; Swift brings more than one programming paradigm and seems clearer and more flexible.

Why Swift 5?

There’s no doubt that Swift is a new and modern language compared to Objective-C. However, due to evolving and exhaustive support from Apple, Swift is a new age programming language for today’s and future Apple devices, platforms, and apple iOS application development.

Swift language is demanding and best because, just like app products, it’s geared to the user and created to work. Another interesting fact about the language is that it’s named the sixth most loved programming language.

It’s nothing like Swift became a one-stop choice for developers. Apple took a lot of time, effort, and inspiration from other languages, including Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, and CLU. After successfully launching 4 versions of Swift, Apple came up with Swift 5.

Swift 5 is one of the greatest milestones you can consider in language development. Not to doubt, a language will become finer, smarter, easier, speeder, and helper to make better apps.

Whether you want to grow your long-established business or start a startup, Swift 5 offers you all the benefits of developing top-class, highly functional, and customized iOS applications. And that’s the reason application like LinkedIn has upgraded their iOS mobile application in Swift.

Takeaway of Swift 5

• Swift 5 is a major release by Apple compared to its previous versions.
• Swift 5 was released in March 2019.
• The focus of Swift 5 is ABI stability for the Swift standard library.
• Swift 5 is compatible with Swift 4, Swift 4.1, and Swift 4.2.
• For Apple’s platform development, Swift 5 ships as part of Xcode 10.2.
• Swift 5 can help you use the code of Swift 4 without any modification.

How is Swift updated? What is new in Swift 5.0?

Swift 5.0 is released and has many features that businesses can reap to develop iPhone mobile apps. Here, you will get to know about features that Swift 5 offer and why you should think to develop your next iOS app on Swift 5.0.

1. Stability of ABI (Application Binary Interface)

This is one of the greatest features you can consider for Swift 5 as an evolved programming language. ABI stands for application binary interface stability, an application programming interface. iOS app developers use a range of API libraries to write Swift code for your apps.

The best thing about ABI is that you don’t have to download the code after downloading and installing the app. Most of these codes are already present on their iPhone as a part of iOS, frameworks, and libraries. ABI stability is the best thing you can consider that make future apps smaller and easier to build.

Apple’s ABI stability offers several benefits to iOS apps, including;

Developers will no longer need to include Swift libraries in an app’s build since Swift libraries will be incorporated into every release of macOS, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS. This will drastically reduce the size of apps. As a result, iOS devices will download them faster and consume less storage space.

Loading time is faster.

Performance improvement

User-friendly interface

2. Updates in Standard Library

If you see the features of the standard library of Swift 4.2 and Swift 5.0, both are almost the same. Here, you will get to know the new features of Swift 5.0.

The standard library in Swift 5 has many features other than Swift 4.2 that help Swift developers to manage their libraries well.

Swift 5 standard library comes with new features and functionalities that you must see. The following are the updates you will see;

• There will be faster code because of the reimplementation of the UTF-8.
• There will be a support to raw texts in string literals.
• The SIMD vector and result types have been added.
• Performance improvements

3. The Result Type

Swift 5 came up with a new result type for iOS app development. In this, you will have two states of a passed result: success and failure. And it’s already been added to Swift’s standard library because of its popularity and high performance.

An object of this type contains all possible return values and errors. Swift 5 can help you write more meaningful code since it uses enumerations.

4. Raw Strings

The next and most interesting feature of Swift 5 is to create raw strings. Raw string in Swift 5 will help you create a more natural language, especially during backslash and Quote marks.

This makes a range of use cases easier and finer, but the regular expression, in particular, will advantage. The great feature you can consider of using raw string is the use of hash symbols at the beginning and end because you can use more than one in the unlikely event you will require to.

At the beginning and end of the string, the hashtag symbols mean string delimiter. Accordingly, Swift considers the quotation marks around “statement” to be quote marks rather than endings.

5. Package Manager Updates

The Swift package manager comes with lots of features in the Swift 5 app development version, including dependency mirroring, personalized deployment targets, target-specific build setting, and the ability to generate the code coverage data.

The best updates in Swift 5 involve updated deployment targets, target-specific build settings, and more. Additionally, one may now import libraries in a REPL without creating an executable using the Swift run command.

Proposals from Swift evolution process:

• Dependency mirroring
• Platform deployment settings
• Target specific build settings

Is Swift 5 required for iOS apps? 

It’s nothing like you should use only Swift 5 to build iOS apps. For iOS App Development, Objective-C is an older programming language version. At the same time, Swift is newer and can build responsive, feature-rich apps. So, if you have been thinking of developing iOS apps, you should contact Mobile App Development Company to get a better idea.