Why Swift?

Want your work on the App Store? The road runs through Swift — Apple's language for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch, and Vision Pro apps.

Born to replace a legend

Until 2014, Apple development meant Objective-C — powerful, but bristling with 1980s syntax. Swift arrived as the modern successor:

• Safe by design — optionals force you to handle "might be missing" values before they crash (Camp 2 covers this gem)
• Fast — compiled with the same LLVM machinery as C++
• Expressive — reads closer to English than to symbols

Where Swift runs

• Every Apple platform — the native language of the ecosystem
• SwiftUI — declarative UI that previews live as you type
• Server-side — frameworks like Vapor power backends in Swift
• Fully open source, running on Linux and Windows too

First taste

No semicolons needed, no main function required at the top level, let for constants — Swift's surface is friendly. (It runs in a cloud sandbox here; first run takes a few seconds.)

What's next

let, var, and Swift's constants-first culture.