Objective-C and Swift are programming languages that are used to code the Apple software products under macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS, CarPlay, and Linux (only for Swift) operating systems. These languages have the corresponding app programming interfaces (APIs) and frameworks (Cocoa, Cocoa Touch). Objective-C was created in the late 80s and impacted Smalltalk (for object-oriented syntax) and C (for non-object) programming languages. The newer language, Swift, is not based on the C language. Instead, it no longer has any inheritance and is just compilable with C libraries and frameworks. Swift offers more powerful tools and modern coding solutions for simpler, but expressive coding, app safety, and performance. As well, the language is intuitive, and thus easier to learn for new programmers.
Another difference Swift vs Objective-C is in the way the code is presented. Swift’s code is unified and has simpler syntax, whereas, working with Objective-C, the code is divided into 2 code blocks:
- header (interface) files (.h)
- implementation files (.m)
Objective-C was originally created by the company Stepstone, by Brad Cox and Tom Love, in 1980s. Further, the Objective-C trademark extended to Apple Computers. Since then, Objective-C has been a standard programming language for macOS and, further, iOS and other Apple platforms. The main characteristic lies in its maturity, since it has been used and tested for many years for Apple’s software.
In contrast, Swift is not limited to Apple OS. In 2015 it became an open source and cross-platform programming language. This takes away the unsafe pointer management and at the same time provides interaction with long-standing Objective-C and C code bases. These days, Apple Inc. promotes the use of Swift and provides constant language version updates.