Recently in World Wide Developer’s Conference 2015, Apple announced to make its very popular SWIFT programing language available to the world under an open source license. This means now the developers will able to utilize the speed and extraordinary features of Swift in their mobile app development activities based on various platforms. Initially developed for making iOS and OS X applications development faster, Swift will now work to make the process of developing mobile apps based on other platforms like Android much faster and efficient. The best of this news is that Swift will now be free to be used for Android app development. This means Swift programming language will now get a better exposure in the world of Android apps programming and will be open for development of apps based on platforms other than iOS and OS X.
Basics for Building an Android App with Swift
So, how does Swift code run on Android devices? Well, there is LLVM compiler designed by the developer of Swift programming language, Chris Lattner. Swift runs on this LLVM compiler which generates an assembly code targeted to an imaginary machine unlike the other compilers which generate machine code targeted to specific architecture. So, when the compiler is requested to generate the intermediate representation or LLVM-IR, it also generates the ARM ELF file format which is used from IR. Then a binary linking is generated against the object file by the Android NDK that which enables the native language use on the Android platform. So, the file that is finally generated is packaged as an Android app.
Actually there exists SwiftCore library that Swift developers use during coding but it is said that as of now this library would not be made available for Android version. So, this could be a problem for Android app development with Swift, but however, the experts say that not all the code of Swift would be dependent on this library and hence, by making the use of such code one can use Swift for Android app development without any problem. Added to this again there is no Swift UI framework available for the developers as in iOS and hence, this could lead to some problems, However, the Swift community is working to solve these issues that could interrupt this process of making Swift an internationally used programming language for diverse mobile apps development.
The Future of Swift to Go Open Source
As Swift will become open source the software development tool developers will now get to develop IDEs or development environments in which developers can write in Swift language and directly compile that code to the Android platform. For this it would definitely require the SwiftCore library, which is expectedly to get updated for the Android version too. With this major step, power of Swift will now get integrated with flexibility of Android to offer the developers and app users the best of what they had experienced till now.
For those looking Android app development can approach Grey Matter India, one of the prominent Android development companies in India. The company has in-house Android experts who have years of experience developing user appealing Android apps with latest technologies and tools. For more details visit the website of the firm at www.greymatterindia.com.
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