The programming languages Objective-C and Swift are used to develop programs for iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, macOS, and watchOS devices. They are the main languages for writing iOS applications. These languages are object-oriented and give an opportunity to group similar tasks in the process of writing code, which greatly accelerates and simplifies the work of developers.

Objective-C programming language

Objective-C is an older language. It was first introduced in the 1980s. Gradually it was perfected and became basic for Apple devices, therefore using Objective-C you can create applications for any technique of “Apple” corporation. The advantages of this language include a high degree of code support, a huge base of training materials and a large community, similarity with the family of languages C, and compatibility with the “younger” language Swift.

Objective-C is also known as ObjC or Obj-C. It is a compiled object-oriented programming language from Apple, which is based on the C language and Smalltalk paradigms. The Objective-C language is fully compatible with C and C code compiles. The object model is built in the Smalltalk style, which means that objects are sent messages. The Objective-C compiler is part of GCC and is available on most major platforms. The language is used primarily for the two implementations of the object-oriented OpenStep interface – MacOS X (Cocoa) and GNUstep.

It is worth mentioning that this language is also message-oriented, unlike C++, which is function-oriented. In Objective-C, method calls are not interpreted as function calls, but as sending a message (with name and arguments) to an object, just like in Smalltalk. This system provides a number of advantages – any object can send any message. Thus, instead of processing a message, an object can delegate its authority to another object to do the processing. In this way, it is easy to implement distributed objects that are in different spaces. Messages are bound to the corresponding function right at runtime.

Swift programming language

In 2014, Apple introduced a new programming language called Swift. According to the developers, this language absorbed the best from the popular Objective-C and C, and at the same time received a more powerful and convenient functionality, more modern tools.

The main advantages of this language is the high speed of development of programs, reducing the code, better readability, support for dynamic libraries, improved security. Swift and Objective-C are compatible, so they can be used even within the same project.