1. Short for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, SWIFT is a financial industry-owned cooperative that supplies secure, standardized messaging services and interface software to 7,800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries. SWIFT s global community includes banks, brokers/dealers, and investment managers, as well as their market infrastructures in payment processing, security, treasury, and trade.
2. Swift also refers to the programming language created by Apple, Inc. for iOS, MacOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Linux platforms. Initially released in 2014 as a proprietary language, Swift and its supporting libraries were published the next year under the Apache 2.0 open source license. A rapid succession of code updates brought Swift into the mainstream, surpassing Objective-C and rising in popularity among the ranks of Python, Rust, and JavaScript.
Swift was introduced to address some of the long-standing challenges of Objective-C programming:
- Safety: Swift utilizes a concise syntax that is easy to read and write. It also has rapid error-handling so programmers can make updates as they work and deploy higher quality code with minimal bugs.
- Efficiency: As the name suggests, Swift s simplicity enables developers to program an operation more quickly and with fewer lines of code than they would with other languages.
- Size: Unlike Objective-C, Swift supports dynamic libraries, which require less memory and offer faster load times than their static counterparts.
