Swift (programming language) in the context of Automatic Reference Counting

The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California, U.S. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the intention of replacing existing character encoding schemes that are limited in size and scope, and are incompatible with multilingual environments.

Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread adoption in the internationalization and localization of software. The standard has been implemented in many technologies, including XML, the Java programming language, Swift, and modern operating systems.

In computer science, manual memory management refers to the usage of manual instructions by the programmer to identify and deallocate unused objects, or garbage. Up until the mid-1990s, the majority of programming languages used in industry supported manual memory management, though garbage collection has existed since 1959, when it was introduced with Lisp Today, however, languages with garbage collection such as Java are increasingly popular and the languages Objective-C and Swift provide similar functionality through Automatic Reference Counting. The main manually managed languages still in widespread use today are C and C++ – see C dynamic memory allocation.

SwiftUI is a declarative framework for building user interfaces for iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS and macOS, developed by Apple Inc. for the Swift programming language.

WatchKit is a framework provided by Apple to develop applications for the Apple Watch. The WatchKit framework is designed for the Swift programming language and also the Objective-C programming language and must be compiled in Xcode, similar to iOS applications.

LLVM is a set of compiler and toolchain technologies that can be used to develop a frontend for any programming language and a backend for any instruction set architecture. LLVM is designed around a language-independent intermediate representation (IR) that serves as a portable, high-level assembly language that can be optimized with a variety of transformations over multiple passes. The name LLVM originally stood for Low Level Virtual Machine. However, the project has since expanded, and the name is no longer an acronym but an orphan initialism.

LLVM is written in C++ and is designed for compile-time, link-time, and runtime optimization. Originally implemented for C and C++, the language-agnostic design of LLVM has since spawned a wide variety of frontends: languages with compilers that use LLVM (or which do not directly use LLVM but can generate compiled programs as LLVM IR) include ActionScript, Ada, C# for .NET, Common Lisp, PicoLisp, Crystal, CUDA, D, Delphi, Dylan, Forth, Fortran, FreeBASIC, Free Pascal, Halide, Haskell, Idris, Jai (only for optimized release builds), Java bytecode, Julia, Kotlin, LabVIEW's G language, Objective-C, OpenCL, PostgreSQL's SQL and PL/pgSQL, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Standard ML, Swift, Xojo, and Zig.

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on objects – software entities that encapsulate data and function(s). An OOP computer program consists of objects that interact with one another. An OOP language is one that provides object-oriented programming features, but as the set of features that contribute to OOP is contested, classifying a language as OOP – and the degree to which it supports OOP – is debatable. As paradigms are not mutually exclusive, a language can be multi-paradigm (i.e. categorized as more than only OOP).

Notable languages with OOP support include Ada, ActionScript, C++, Common Lisp, C#, Dart, Eiffel, Fortran 2003, Haxe, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Logo, MATLAB, Objective-C, Object Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Raku, Ruby, Scala, SIMSCRIPT, Simula, Smalltalk, Swift, Vala and Visual Basic (.NET).

Objective-C is a high-level general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style message passing (messaging) to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXTSTEP operating system. Due to Apple macOS’s direct lineage from NeXTSTEP, Objective-C was the standard language used, supported, and promoted by Apple for developing macOS and iOS applications (via their respective application programming interfaces (APIs), Cocoa and Cocoa Touch) from 1997, when Apple purchased NeXT, until the introduction of the Swift language in 2014.

Objective-C programs developed for non-Apple operating systems or that are not dependent on Apple's APIs may also be compiled for any platform supported by GNU GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) or LLVM/Clang.