Swift is a general-purpose programming language that’s approachable for newcomers and powerful for experts. It is fast, modern, safe, and a joy to write.

Swift is general-purpose and modern. Suitable for everything from systems programming, through mobile and desktop apps, to cloud services.
Swift is safe. Undefined behavior is the enemy of safety, and it’s best to catch mistakes before software goes into production. Swift makes the obvious path the safest.
Swift is fast to run and quick to write. It comes with predictable and consistent performance that is on-par with C-based languages without sacrificing developer friendliness.
Swift is approachable and powerful. From a single-line “Hello, World!” to large-scale apps with hundreds of thousands of lines. Swift scales with your needs.

Swift includes features that make code easier to read and write, while giving the developer the control needed in a true systems programming language. Swift supports inferred types to make code cleaner and less prone to mistakes, and modules eliminate headers and provide namespaces. Memory is managed automatically, and you don’t even need to type semi-colons. Swift also borrows from other languages, for instance named parameters brought forward from Objective-C are expressed in a clean syntax that makes APIs in Swift easy to read and maintain.

The features of Swift are designed to work together to create a language that is powerful, yet fun to use. Some additional features of Swift include:

• Closures unified with function pointers
• Tuples and multiple return values
• Generics
• Fast and concise iteration over a range or collection
• Structs that support methods, extensions, and protocols
• Functional programming patterns, e.g., map and filter
• Powerful error handling built-in
• Advanced control flow with do, guard, defer, and repeat keywords