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Difference between Swift and Objective C

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1. Swift : Swift is a general-purpose, compiled, high-level programming language which is designed by Apple in 2014. It was developed by Chris Lattner with eventual collaboration with other programmers at Apple. It has object-oriented features of Objective-C and has similar syntax. Swift is intended to be used primarily for iOS and macOS development, it also can be used for Linux development. Swift handles some programming obstacles faced when using Objective C such as:

  • It prevents integers from overflowing their allotted memory.
  • It automatically manages memory.
  • It initializes variables before obstacles are in used.

It is optimized for Apple hardware so, it can performed better than other language. 

Pros of Swift :

  • In 2018 swift was in 14th ranked among the most popular programming languages.
  • As the performance of swift, it is 2.6x faster than Objective C and 8.4x faster than python.
  • It got an encouraging syntax that make you write clean and consistent code.
  • It provides improve readability and prevent errors.

Cons of Swift :

  • The cons in swift was it can only be used to develop application that targets iOS7 or later.
  • Swift may be the fastest language in the era but still it is still so young and need to be fix some issues.
  • This language got limited talent pool.
  • In swift, there is a lot lack of support for earlier iOS version.

2. Objective C : Objective C is an general purpose, object-oriented programming language. It was developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love at their company Stepstone. Where C is a Procedural Oriented Language, Objective C adds syntax and semantics that allows for an object oriented language. This is also called as Obj C in programming language. It is a type of programming language that used in the OS X and iOS OS and their APIs. Originally it developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love at their company Stepstone in 1980s. Objective C adds to a new language features in C Programming language. ‘.m’ source code is the extensions used for Objective C. 

Pros of Objective C :

  • As the language was implemented on existing C compilers as a pre processor a GCC module.
  • Objective C is more compatible with C++.
  • Objective C is more stable.
  • In Objective C, the usages of private APIs is easier.

Cons of Objective C :

  • As a cons Objective C does not supports operator overloading like C++.
  • The first version of Objective C does not supports garbage collection, but still it uses a little runtime written in C which added to the size of the application.
  • Since it was based on C Compilers, it is dependent on a header file to work well.
  • The language Objective C is a little complex but this is expected as a fairly old language.

Difference between Swift and Objective C :

S.No. SWIFT OBJECTIVE C
01. Swift is a general-purpose, high-level programming language which is highly concerned about safety, performance. Objective C is an general purpose language which is considered as superset of C language it was designed in an aim of providing object-oriented capabilities.
02. It was developed by Chris Lattner with eventual collaboration with other programmers at Apple. It was developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love at their company Stepstone.
03. It was influenced by Objective C, Rust, Ruby, Python. It was influenced by C and Smalltalk.
04. Swift was first appeared on the year 2014. Objective C was first appeared on the year 1984.
05. Swift is static type. Objective C is dynamic type.
06. Swift is apache licensed open source project. Objective C is licensed under General Public License.
07. It has both structs and classes. It only has classes.
08. It was designed for building apps for iOS, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Watch. Objective C was designed to be smalltalk messaging features.
09. Swift polymorphism does not exist directly. Polymorphism in Objective C exist directly in compile time.
10. It uses true and false values. It uses YES and NO values and also BOOl.
11. Swift has multiple types of templates than Objective C. Objective C has lacks of templates than Swift.

Last Updated : 07 Feb, 2023
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