Stacks8.9K

Followers6K

+ 1

Votes1.1K

Xcode

Stacks9K

Followers6.2K

+ 1

Votes210

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Swift vs Xcode: What are the differences?

What is Swift? An innovative new programming language for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. 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.

What is Xcode? The complete toolset for building great apps. The Xcode IDE is at the center of the Apple development experience. Tightly integrated with the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks, Xcode is an incredibly productive environment for building amazing apps for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Swift can be classified as a tool in the "Languages" category, while Xcode is grouped under "Integrated Development Environment".

"Ios" is the primary reason why developers consider Swift over the competitors, whereas "IOS Development" was stated as the key factor in picking Xcode.

Swift is an open source tool with 48.4K GitHub stars and 7.76K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Swift's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Xcode has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1052 company stacks & 604 developers stacks; compared to Swift, which is listed in 994 company stacks and 541 developer stacks.

Pros of Swift

Pros of Xcode

247
Ios
172
Elegant
122
Not Objective-C
103
Backed by apple
88
Type inference
56
Generics
51
Playgrounds
45
Semicolon free
37
OSX
34
Tuples offer compound variables
19
Easy to learn
19
Clean Syntax
18
Functional
17
Open Source
14
Beautiful Code
9
Linux
8
Dynamic
7
Promotes safe, readable code
7
Explicit optionals
6
Protocol-oriented programming
6
No S-l-o-w JVM
4
Storyboard designer
3
Best UI concept
3
Super addicting language, great people, open, elegant
3
Optionals
2
Faster and looks better
2
Swift is faster than Objective-C
2
Protocol extensions
2
Type safety
2
Highly Readable codes
2
Native
2
Its fun and damn fast
2
Feels like a better C++
1
Powerful
1
Esay
1
Numbers with underbar
1
MacOS
1
Optional chain
1
Protocol as type
1
Protocol oriented programming
1
Strong Type safety
1
Actually don't have to own a mac
1
Type Safe
1
Fail-safe
1
Can interface with C easily
1
Easy to learn and work
1
Its friendly
1
Easy to Maintain
1
Much more fun
0
Swift is easier to understand for non-iOS developers.

129
IOS Development
33
Personal assistant on steroids
29
Easy setup
17
Excellent integration with Clang
1
Beautiful
1
Built-in everything

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Cons of Swift

Cons of Xcode

1
Must own a mac
1
Is a lot more effort than lua to make simple functions
1
Memory leaks are not uncommon
1
Its classes compile to roughly 300 lines of assembly
1
Very irritatingly picky about things that’s
1
Complicated process for exporting modules
0
Overly complex options makes it easy to create bad code

4
Massively bloated and complicated for smaller projects
1
Very slow emulator
1
Horrible auto completiting and text editing

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- No public GitHub repository available -

What is Swift?

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.

What is Xcode?

The Xcode IDE is at the center of the Apple development experience. Tightly integrated with the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks, Xcode is an incredibly productive environment for building amazing apps for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

What companies use Swift?

What companies use Xcode?

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What tools integrate with Swift?

What tools integrate with Xcode?

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What are some alternatives to Swift and Xcode?

Objective-C

Objective-C is a superset of the C programming language and provides object-oriented capabilities and a dynamic runtime. Objective-C inherits the syntax, primitive types, and flow control statements of C and adds syntax for defining classes and methods. It also adds language-level support for object graph management and object literals while providing dynamic typing and binding, deferring many responsibilities until runtime.

React Native

React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.

Kotlin

Kotlin is a statically typed programming language for the JVM, Android and the browser, 100% interoperable with Java

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.

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!

See all alternatives

Interest over time

News about Swift

Welcome to Swift Blog

(developer.apple.com)

Jul 11, 2014

Compatibility

(developer.apple.com)

Jul 11, 2014

Swift Language Changes in Xcode 6 beta 3

(developer.apple.com)

Jul 15, 2014