Difference Between Swift vs Go
Swift is a general-purpose programming language developed by Apple for operating system like iOS, macOS, watch OS, and Linux. Swift supports multiple programming paradigms, and it is object-oriented, functional and imperative in nature. It is heavily designed to work with Apple’s Cocoa and Cocoa Touch Frameworks. Go is a programming language also known by the name of Golang, created by Google in 2009. Go supports multi-paradigm like procedural, functional and concurrent. Its syntax is traditionally coming from C, but it has done a lot of modification to improve upon features like simplicity and safety.
Swift
- Swift 4 version is the latest on Swift landscape. It adopts the best of C and Objective-C, without the constraint of C compatibility. It uses the same runtime environment as the existing Objective-C system on Mac OS and iOS, which enables Swift 4 programs to run on many existing iOS 6 and OS X 10.8 platforms.
- Swift does not a separate library import to support functionalities like input/output or string handling. It comes along with the Playground feature, where Swift programmers can write their code and execute to see their results immediately. The first release of Swift was released in 2010.
- The latest version of Swift provides a playground platform for learning purposes. A developer needs to have Xcode software to start Swift coding in the Playground. The syntax of Swift would be more familiar to web developers. Anyone having some programming experience with JavaScript or other scripting languages would find it easier to pick up Swift.
- There are many lucrative features of Swift that are making it an emerging programming language. Swift designers took ideas from various other programming languages such as Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C# and CLU. It makes use of safe programming patterns, which is one of the key ingredients of modern programming features.
- Swift provides a fabulous way to write iOS and OS X apps by providing seamless access to existing Cocoa frameworks. Swift has this wonderful capability to combine procedural and object-oriented portions of the language.
Go
- Go syntax after arriving from modification with C is to keep the code readable and compact. It adds literal syntax, which allows easier iteration over collection data structure like strings, maps, etc.
- Most of the features about Go and its tools follow the UNIX pattern, having with utility in mind, so instead of merging into the language structure, a developer can now focus more on the development logic.
- You don’t have to compile your Go code to run it. It will be automatically compiled and run. A major strength of Go is that it’s minimalistic and fast.
- People do write a lot of scripts in it. Go can act as a very powerful tool when it comes to web-programming, microservices or mobile development. In many use cases, Go web development has proved to be more rapid than Swift.
Head to Head Comparison Between Swift and Go Infographics
Below is the top 8 difference between Swift and Go:
Key Differences Between Swift and Go
The Key Differences Between Swift and Go Performance are explained in the below-mentioned points:
- Swift is a pretty complex language, whereas Go is minimalistic, making it easy to learn and master.
- Swift uses a reference counting mechanism instead of a mark and sweep strategy for garbage collection, whereas Go has automatic garbage collection.
- Swift’s library and support are Apple-centric, although open-source with an official Linux port but no official Windows support, whereas Go is open source and not specific to a product or operating system.
- Swift is better designed to work on iOS for writing apps, whereas Go is more suited toward writing servers and web development.
- Swift syntax still may change, as the language is not final, whereas Go is on 1.3 now and is more stable in nature.
- Swift has a built-in Playground that seems similar to iPython’s Notebook, whereas Go only has an online Playground, which lets you run a limited subset of Go programs online.
- Swift does support generic types, whereas Go does not support generic type.
- Swift looks into the future; it embraces modern ideas from programming language design and research, whereas Go looks to the past, rejecting any modern idea about language design.
- Swift is focused on a very narrow and specific task, writing iOS apps, whereas Go aims at a very broad task, writing generic backend services.
- With its declaration syntax, Swift is more like Rust language, whereas Go has a short form variable declaration that’s close to Python and a long-form declaration closer to C++.
- Swift is more suitable for client-side development on a Cocoa framework, whereas Go is more suited for writing down servers and web application’s server functionalities.
Swift and Go Comparison Table
Below are the lists of points, describe the key differences between Swift and Go Performance.
| Basis Of Comparison Between Swift vs Go | Swift | Go |
| Paradigm | Object-oriented, imperative, functional | Procedural, functional and concurrent |
| Creator | Apple | |
| OS Support | Primarily used for iOS | Primarily used for Windows, Linux |
| Usage | Created by Apple, used on iOS for app creation | Go is more focused on being a system language, good for servers and web development. |
| Design | Seamless use of Apple’s Cocoa Touch frameworks | Focus on the safety and performance of a natively compiled language like C |
| Generic | Swift support Generic types | Go does not have Generic types |
| Nature | Has in-built Playground | Has only an online Playground |
| Compilation | Swift is not so quick to compile as compare to Go | Go compiles quickly |
Conclusion
In a nutshell, both Swift vs Go have their own set of merits, depending on the programmer’s skill and ability to understand the real-world requirement. Swift is often described as a top-down, bottom-up language. It is good for writing safe programs but also, in comparison to Go, offers powerful generics to allow general-purpose libraries to be written to extend the power of the language. Swift does not offer any concurrency language features, preferring to leave that to libraries. Go is good for writing programs rather than libraries. If you want to build programs, Go is pretty simple to learn and easy to write. It offers good support for concurrency, although you still need to be careful to avoid race conditions.
Go vs Swift take dramatically different approaches to developer productivity. Swift offers (and checks) a broad range of type-level features that are familiar to developers coming from C#, Java, and C++. Go’s philosophy is “less is more”, offering generics for maps and arrays and little else and providing only traits (interfaces) for polymorphism.
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With the explanation of the above functionalities and features for both Go vs Swift languages, developers have the choice to pick up a better language that can fulfill their project requirement. It all boils down to the project nature, its specific requirement, and the developer’s ease with a language at the end of the day.
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