ActionScript vs Swift

Overview

Swift

Stacks21.9K

Followers13.6K

Votes1.3K

ActionScript

Stacks365

Followers85

Votes1

ActionScript vs Swift: What are the differences?

1. **Syntax**: ActionScript uses a syntax similar to JavaScript, while Swift uses a more modern and concise syntax that is influenced by Objective-C. 2. **Platform**: ActionScript is mainly used for developing web applications and games, while Swift is primarily used for iOS and macOS app development. 3. **Types**: ActionScript is weakly typed, allowing for flexibility but potentially leading to runtime errors, whereas Swift is strongly typed, ensuring type safety at compile time. 4. **Memory Management**: ActionScript uses automatic garbage collection for memory management, whereas Swift utilizes Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) to manage memory efficiently. 5. **Community and Support**: Swift benefits from a large and active community of developers and extensive documentation provided by Apple, whereas ActionScript has declined in popularity and support over the years. 6. **Prominent Usage**: While ActionScript was widely used in Flash applications and websites, Swift has gained popularity as the preferred language for developing iOS apps due to its modern features and performance.

In Summary, the key differences between ActionScript and Swift lie in their syntax, platform use, type system, memory management approach, community support, and prominent usage in software development.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Swift	ActionScript
Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast. Swift is ready for your next iOS and OS X project — or for addition into your current app — because Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C.	It is the programming language for the Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR runtime environments. It is used by developers to create animations and video games.
-	object-oriented programming language; create animations and video games;
Statistics
Stacks 21.9K	Stacks 365
Followers 13.6K	Followers 85
Votes 1.3K	Votes 1
Pros & Cons
Pros 259 Ios 180 Elegant 126 Not Objective-C 107 Backed by apple 93 Type inference Cons 6 Must own a mac 2 Memory leaks are not uncommon 1 Its classes compile to roughly 300 lines of assembly 1 Very irritatingly picky about things that’s 1 Is a lot more effort than lua to make simple functions	Pros 1 Very good on ActionScript 2 Cons 1 Not good on ActionScript 3
Integrations
Cocoa Touch (iOS)	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Swift, ActionScript?

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.