

New to App Development – Objective C or Swift - ankit1911

Hi, I have been programming in C since past 4 years. I am comfortable with the complexity of pointers in C. 
Currently I am working for a MNC in India, but I want to become an independent app-developer. I purchased a Mac book Air and an iPhone recently and want to get started with iPhone app development in near future. 
My concern is what language should I start learning, Objective-C or swift ?
I prefer performance&#x2F;features over easy learning curve. 
I browsed the internet only to be more confused. Would like to hear from people who are into Apple App development since quite some time now. Also, it will be very helpful if you can list some good source to learn objective-C&#x2F;swift.
Thanks.
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dottrap
Since you already know C and are comfortable with it, start with Objective C.
The hard part of app development is Cocoa and the other Apple frameworks
(because they are huge), not the language. Because Swift is so new, most of
the documentation and open source code are in Objective-C.

Additionally Cocoa was designed with Obj-C in mind. There are current learning
pains with Swift on trying to understand how to best bridge Cocoa.

And Swift is a more complicated language than Obj-C. There are a lot more
concepts to learn in Swift. (It seems like every other Swift article I come
across is something about optionals.) Brent Simmons just posted this which
expresses this issue:

[http://inessential.com/2015/02/04/random_swift_things](http://inessential.com/2015/02/04/random_swift_things)

And the performance of Swift is not at par with C in most cases. And debug
build performance is terrible for anything realtime/multimedia/game centric.
This was recently discussed by David Owens II:

[http://owensd.io/2015/02/01/the-optimization-
game.html](http://owensd.io/2015/02/01/the-optimization-game.html)

As for resources, I recommend Aaron Hillegass's (of Big Nerd Ranch) Cocoa
Programming books. He has trained generations of Cocoa programmers well, since
the NeXT days.

~~~
ankit1911
Thank you very much for your time & effort. Appreciate it.

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melling
Just start with the latest Stanford iOS class in Swift. First link under
Getting Started:
[http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html](http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html)

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ghuntley
What about F#/C#? [http://xamarin.com/](http://xamarin.com/)

