Are you planning to create an iOS application but confused between choosing Swift or SwiftUI? If yes, then fret no more! This article is all about what is Swift and SwiftUI and the difference between these two. So, let’s begin with what is Swift and SwiftUI.
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WHAT IS SWIFT?
Swift is a modern powerful cross-platform programming language developed by Apple Inc. and the open-source community. Swift is the replacement of Objective-C programming language that has advanced features, dynamic libraries, and easy-to-read and maintains APIs, automatic memory management, LLVM compiler technology, etc. It’s compatible with writing applications for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. The code of Swift is very interactive, simple, and concise that making the development process easy and enjoyable.
Features of Swift
Easy syntax: Swift allows complex ideas to be expressed clearly and concisely as it combines powerful type inference and pattern matching with an easy, lightweight, and modern syntax. The inferred types make the syntax and code clean and easy while less prone to mistakes. As a result, the code readability and maintainability are improved.
Native error handling: Developers can manipulate, catch, throw, and propagate errors at run time as Swift provides support for native error handling. Moreover, it can also handle common programming errors like null point dereferencing.
Structs and classes: The structure or classes in Swift are defined in a single file and the external interface is structured for other code to use.
Protocol extensions: Rather than in global functions or individual conformances, Swift allows developers to define behavior on protocols themselves.
Memory safety: Swift automatically manages memory using tight, deterministic reference counting, and prevents insecure behavior from happening in your code. Moreover, it keeps the memory usage to a minimum without the overhead of garbage collection.
Memory management: Swift tracks and manages app memory usages with automatic reference counting which means that developers don’t need to take care of the memory by themselves.
Debugging: The LLDB debugger is used by Swift that enables consistent formatting, integrated debugging, expression evaluation, and failure recovery with a REPL and debugger.
Source and binary compatibility: Binary compatibility for apps is included in the latest version of Swift. Every OS comes with swift libraries that mean your apps will use the latest version of the library in the OS. As a result, the code can be run without recompiling.
Package manager: Developers can build, run, test, and package swift libraries and executables with the help of the swift package manager.
Powerful generics: Swift has powerful generics that make the developers work easy by allowing them to write flexible, reusable functions, and types.
WHAT IS SWIFTUI?
SwiftUI is an Apple framework for designing modern, aesthetic, and user-friendly interfaces for all Apple platforms. The framework comprises UI components such as lists, stacks, buttons, pickers, etc. It allows developers to declare user interface structure by using views, controls, and layout structure. The drawing and animation feature of SwiftUI improves app views with mesmerizing shapes, colors, shadows, and personalized animation transitions between view states. The SwiftUI framework also provides event handlers for delivering gestures, taps, and another sort of input to an app.
Features of SwiftUI
Advanced app experiences and tools: SwiftUI has advanced new features such as list views, better search experiences, and support for control focus ranges. It has a modern GPU-accelerated equivalent and new Canvas API.
Improved accessibility: The new Rotor API in the SwiftUI framework speeds up interactions by exposing the most relevant items on a screen in a simple list. The VoiceOver cursor can easily be read and changed programmatically.
SwiftUI improvements on macOS: SwiftUI helps in making your macOS apps even better and efficient as it comes with new performance and API availability including support for multicolumn tables.
Widgets for iPadOS: Developers can now design extra-large sizes widgets and place them anywhere on the Home screen using SwiftUI.
Always-On Retina Display support: Always-On Retina Display feature of SwiftUI is available on Apple watch 5 and later allows watchOS apps to be always even if the watch face is dimmed. It makes the key information available at a glance.
Xcode support: Developers can build UI faster than ever before with SwiftUI as it is integrated into Xcode. It enables developers to edit the UI of the app in a code or in a visual editor that automatically reflects what code translates to. The preview feature in Xcode drastically speeds up the user interface development without the need of running the application in a simulator.
Gestures: SwiftUI gestures describe interaction from clicks, taps, and swipes to fine-grained gestures.
Integration: SwiftUI views can be easily integrated with objects from the UIKit, AppKit, and Watchkit frameworks. Developers can take advantage of this platform by customizing accessibility support. It also helps in the localization of your app’s user interface for different countries, languages, or cultural regions.
What is the difference between Swift and SwiftUI?
SwiftUI is written in Swift programming language that controls and describes the user interface. Swift works in a way like “I want an image over there, a button here, and a text field there”, and SwiftUI knows how to draw the text, how to make the button, how to load and show the image, and how it can be tapped by the user. SwiftUI is very responsive and quickly responds to swipe gestures, images, text, etc.
The code written in SwiftUI uses a declarative syntax that enables you to simply state what your user interface should do. Developers can select a wide range of ready-to-use effects with only a few lines of code. SwiftUI provides drag and drop tools, dynamic replacement, and previews which makes the UI process smooth and faster. Swift is more emphasized on creating secure and powerful applications while SwiftUI focuses on providing an exceptional user experience through top-notch UI.
Wrapping up
Swift and SwiftUI are almost the same with the purpose of building extremely modern, advanced, and improved applications with enhanced features. Swift code is interactive, fun, and safe by design. It also produces Apple software and applications that run lightning-fast. On the other hand, the SwiftUI framework lets you design aesthetically-pleasing applications with utmost performance and quality. Swift has a simple yet expressive syntax while SwiftUI has a declarative syntax and style. Declarative style can be easily applied to complex concepts like animations. Swift UI and Swift both play a vital role in creating modern Apple applications
