Chapter 1. Exploring Swift's Power and Performance

In the 2014, Apple released a new programming language, called Swift. Swift has been designed from scratch with many powerful features. It is statically typed and very safe. It has a clean and nice syntax, it's fast, it's flexible, and it has many other advantages that you will learn later in the book. Swift seems to be very powerful and it has big potential. Apple has set big expectations for Swift, and their main goal for Swift is that it should be a replacement for Objective-C, which is going to happen in the near future.

In this chapter, you will become familiar with the Swift programming language, what it was made for, and what its advantages and features are. We will also make our first Swift application and see how easy it is to integrate with existing Objective-C code.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Welcome to Swift
• Writing swift code
• Swift interoperability
• The importance of performance and performance key metrics