Overview

Java

Stacks138.7K

Followers105.5K

Votes3.7K

Swift

Stacks20.6K

Followers13.6K

Votes1.3K

Java vs Swift: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown code presents the key differences between Java and Swift programming languages in a concise and organized manner. Java and Swift are popular programming languages used for different purposes, and understanding their differences is essential for developers looking to choose the right language for their projects.

Syntax: Java and Swift have different syntaxes. Java uses a C-like syntax, while Swift has a more modern and concise syntax. Swift eliminates semicolons at the end of each statement, uses type inference, and includes features like optional chaining and shorthand argument names.
Memory Management: Another significant difference is in memory management. Java uses automatic garbage collection, where the programmer does not have to worry about memory allocation and deallocation. In contrast, Swift uses Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), a system that automatically frees up memory when an object is no longer needed. Swift provides better memory performance by automatically managing reference counts.
Platform: Java is platform-independent, meaning Java code can run on any operating system with a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). On the other hand, Swift is primarily used for developing applications on Apple's platforms, such as iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. While there are ways to use Swift on other platforms, its native support is limited to Apple devices.
Null Safety: Swift introduced the concept of optionals to handle nil values more safely. Optionals provide a type-safe way to represent a value that may be missing. Java, being an older language, does not have built-in support for null safety. Handling null values in Java requires manual checks and can lead to NullPointerExceptions if not done correctly.
Functional Programming: Swift has better support for functional programming concepts compared to Java. Swift includes features like first-class functions, closures, and higher-order functions that make it easier to write functional code. Java introduced some functional programming features with Java 8, like lambda expressions and functional interfaces, but Swift provides a more comprehensive set of functional programming tools.
Interoperability: Java has excellent interoperability with other languages due to its mature and widely adopted nature. It can be easily integrated with other languages like C and C++. Swift, while also designed for interoperability, has limited support compared to Java. It can be used with Objective-C, but interacting with other languages may require additional effort and libraries.

In Summary, Java and Swift differ in syntax, memory management, platform support, null safety, functional programming capabilities, and interoperability.

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Advice on Java, Swift

Erik

Chief Architect at LiveTiles

May 18, 2020

Decided

C# and .Net were obvious choices for us at LiveTiles given our investment in the Microsoft ecosystem. It enabled us to harness of the .Net framework to build ASP.Net MVC, WebAPI, and Serverless applications very easily. Coupled with the high productivity of Visual Studio, it's the native tongue of Microsoft technology.

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Comments

Nick

Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream

Sep 5, 2019

Review

I work at Stream and I'm immensely proud of what our team is working on here at the company. Most recently, we announced our Android SDK accompanied by an extensive tutorial for Java and Kotlin. The tutorial covers just about everything you need to know when it comes to using our Android SDK for Stream Chat. The Android SDK touches many features offered by Stream Chat – more specifically, typing status, read state, file uploads, threads, reactions, editing messages, and commands. Head over to https://getstream.io/tutorials/android-chat/ and give it a whirl!

175k views175k

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Ido

Mar 6, 2020

Decided

When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.

You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Java	Swift
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!	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.
Statistics
Stacks 138.7K	Stacks 20.6K
Followers 105.5K	Followers 13.6K
Votes 3.7K	Votes 1.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros 607 Great libraries 446 Widely used 401 Excellent tooling 396 Huge amount of documentation available 334 Large pool of developers available Cons 33 Verbosity 27 NullpointerException 17 Nightmare to Write 16 Overcomplexity is praised in community culture 12 Boiler plate code	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 Is a lot more effort than lua to make simple functions 1 Very irritatingly picky about things that’s 1 Its classes compile to roughly 300 lines of assembly
Integrations
Spring	Cocoa Touch (iOS)

What are some alternatives to Java, Swift?

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.

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.

Rust

Rust is a systems programming language that combines strong compile-time correctness guarantees with fast performance. It improves upon the ideas of other systems languages like C++ by providing guaranteed memory safety (no crashes, no data races) and complete control over the lifecycle of memory.