Shift to Swift in 2017

It’s a great time to be a Swift developer because this modern programming language has a lot of momentum and community support behind it and a big future ahead of it. Swift became a real contender when it became open source in December 2015, giving developers the power to build their own tools and port it into the environments in which they work. The release of Swift 3 in September 2016 really shook things up by enabling broad scale adoption across multiple platforms – including portability to Linus/x86, Raspberry Pi, and Android.

Swift 3 is the “spring cleaning” release that, while not being backwards compatible, has resulted in a massively cleaner language and ensured sound and consistent language fundamentals that will carry across to future releases. If you’re a developer using Swift, the best thing you can do is get on board with Swift 3 as the next release promises to deliver stability from 3.0 onwards. Swift 4 is expected to be released in late 2017 with the goals of providing source stability for Swift 3 code and ABI stability for the Swift standard library.

Despite this shake up that occurred with the new release, developers are still enthusiastic about Swift – it was one of the “most loved” programming languages in StackOverflow’s 2015 and 2016 Developer Surveys. Swift was also one of the top 3 trending techs in 2016 as it’s been stealing market share from Objective C. The keen interest that developers have in Swift is reflected by the +35,000 stars it has amassed on Github and the impressive amount of ongoing collaboration between its core team and the wider community.

Rumour has it that Google is considering making Swift a “first class” language and that Facebook and Uber are looking to make Swift more central to their operations. Lyft’s migration of its iOS app to Swift in 2015 shows that the lightness, leanness, and maintainability of the code are worth it and services like the web server and toolkit Perfect are proof that the server-side Swift is ready.

People are starting to do some cool and surprising things with Swift. Including…

• Shaping the language itself. Apple has made a repository on Github called swift-evolution that houses proposals for enhancements and changes to the Swift language.
• Developers are bringing Swift 3 to as many ARM-based systems as possible. For example, you can get Swift 3 for all the Raspberry Pi boards or you can program a robot in Swift on a BeagleBone.
• IBM has adopted Swift as the core language for their cloud platform. This opens the door to radically simpler app dev. Developers will be able to build the next generation of apps in native Swift from end-to-end, deploy applications with both server and client components, and build microservice APIs on the cloud.
• The Swift Sandbox lets developers of any level of experience can actively build server-based code. Since launching it’s had over 2 million code runs from over 100 countries.

We think there are going to be a lot of exciting opportunities for developers to work with Swift in the near future. The iOS Developer Skill Plan on Mapt is perfect for diving into Swift and we have plenty of Swift 3 books and videos if you have more specific projects in mind.The large community of developers using iOS/OSX and making libraries combined with the growing popularity of Swift as a general-purpose language makes jumping into Swift a worthwhile venture.

Interested in what other developers have been up to across the tech landscape? Find out in our free Skill Up: Developer Talk report on the state of software in 2017.