Commonly used programming languages to create iOS software

1. Objective-C 

Objective-C was developed in 1984 by two developers, Tom Love and Brad Cox. Prior to Apple's release of Swift in 2014, Objective-C was the primary language for Apple's iOS mobile apps.

Objective-C is a general-purpose object-oriented programming language that brings the Smalltalk flavor to the C programming language. Passing messages between objects is an important feature of Objective-C and is very useful in Apple's iOS operating system.

Nowadays, Swift has overtaken Objective-C in terms of popularity and usefulness. Objective-C is a superset of the C programming language that provides dynamic runtime and object-oriented functionality. Objective-C inherits C syntax, primitive types, and flow statements, and adds syntax for defining classes and methods.

It also adds language-level support for object graph and object character management while providing dynamic binding and typing, deferring a lot of responsibility until run time.

2. Swift

Currently, the iOS operating system primarily uses the Swift programming language. Apple Technology developed and released this language in 2014. In December 2015, Swift was open-sourced by Apple under Apache License 2.0. In addition to iOS, Swift is also a programming language for macOS, watchOS, tvOS, Linux, and z/OS.

Prior to Swift, Objective-C was the primary language for iOS development. Since Objective-C was released 30 years ago, it's inevitable that the language can't support modern needs. Swift is a modern programming language that offers modern language features such as dynamics, safety, late binding, and extensibility.

In 2018, Swift surpassed Objective-C's popularity and became the number one programming language for iOS and other Apple operating systems. Swift is the recommended language for building new iOS, TvOS, and WatchOS platforms.

Related article:  Swift and brief introduction. The differences between Swift and Objective-C

3. C#

The C# was created by Microsoft Anders Hejlsberg and released in 2000. C# is a simple, modern, flexible, object-oriented, secure, open-source programming language. C# is considered one of the most versatile programming languages ​​in the world.

C# allows developers to build all kinds of applications such as Windows clients, consoles, web applications, mobile applications, backend systems, and more.

C# language developers can use Xamarin to build native iOS and Android mobile apps. Xamarin is a tool as part of Visual Studio that allows developers to write C# code compiled into native iOS and Android binaries. These binaries work exactly like native apps written in other iOS and Android languages ​​such as Swift and Kotlin.

C# allows developers to build native iOS and Android mobile apps without having to learn a new programming language.

Related article: offshore-development" target="_blank" rel="noopener">C # Language Features and Applications | Vietnam Offshore Development

4. Python

Python is one of the most popular programming languages these days. Created by Guido van Rossum in 1991, Python is an open-source, high-level general-purpose programming language.

Python is a dynamic programming language that supports object-oriented, mandatory, functional, and procedural development models. Python is one of the most popular and most familiar languages in the programming industry.

For iOS application development, you can use Python to create libraries, functions, and back-end processing tasks.

5. C++

C++ is one of the oldest and most popular programming languages in use to date. C++ is one of the general-purpose programming languages. It is read as "Sea Plus Plus" and is sometimes called "Sea Plus" or "Sea Plus".

Simply put, it's the language C with various improvements, including object-oriented programming. With improvements, it can be treated as a procedural programming language as well as the old language C.

6. HTML

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. Simply put, it's a computer-understandable markup word.

Markup was originally an editorial term for magazines and newspapers and refers to instructions for sentence composition. For example, it is like an annotation such as [This sentence is a title] [These two sentences are a set of articles].

On the Web, HTML is used for computer instruction to compose sentences for information such as sentences and photos that you want to display on the home page. You can combine HTML5 with CSS and other technologies to build apps that embed iOS.

However, applications created this way are not native applications. The hybrid app wraps around the browser control and uses HTML and CSS to render the app's pages.

7. Conclusion

iOS is a very widely used operating system and is the second most popular after Android. Objective-C and Swift are the two major programming languages used to build iOS apps.

Objective-C is an old programming language, but Swift is the latest fast, clean and evolving programming language. If you're a new developer who wants to create iOS apps, Swift is for you.

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