Chapter 1. Introducing Swift in depth
In this chapter
- A brief overview of Swift’s popularity and supported platforms
- The benefits of Swift
- A closer look at Swift’s subtle downsides
- What we will learn in this book
It is no secret that Swift is supported on many platforms, such as Apple’s iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Swift is open source and also runs on Linux, and it’s gaining popularity on the server side with web frameworks such as Vapor, Perfect, Zewo, and IBM’s Kitura.
On top of that, Swift is slowly not only encompassing application programming (software for users) but also starting to enter systems programming (software for systems), such as SwiftNIO or command-line tools. Swift is maturing into a multi-platform language. By learning Swift, many doors open to you.
Swift was the most popular language on Stack overflow in 2015 and remains in the top five most-loved languages in 2017. In 2018, Swift bumped to number 6 (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018).
Swift is clearly here to stay, and whether you love to create apps, web services, or other programs, I aim for you to get as much value as possible out of this book for both yourself and any team you’re on.
What I love about Swift is that it’s easy to learn, yet hard to master. There’s always more to learn! One of the reasons is that Swift embraces many programming paradigms, allowing you to pick a suitable solution to a programming problem, which you’re going to explore in this book.