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Swift is a powerful and intuitive, general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Apple Inc. It was introduced in 2014 as a modern alternative to Objective-C, designed to be safer, faster, and more expressive. Swift is primarily used for building applications across Apple's platforms, including iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, but its open-source nature and cross-platform capabilities extend its use to Linux, Windows, and server-side development.

Key characteristics of Swift:

Safety: Swift emphasizes code safety by eliminating entire classes of common programming errors. It enforces variable initialization, provides automatic memory management (ARC), and includes features like optionals to safely handle potentially missing values, preventing crashes caused by nil references.

Performance: Designed with performance in mind, Swift is highly efficient and often outperforms older languages like Objective-C. It leverages modern compiler technologies and optimizations to deliver fast execution speeds.

Expressiveness and Readability: Swift's syntax is concise and clear, promoting readable and maintainable code. Features like type inference, closures, and modern control flow statements contribute to its expressive power.

Modern Features: Swift incorporates modern programming language features such as generics, protocols, and first-class functions, enabling developers to write flexible and reusable code.

Open Source and Cross-Platform: Swift was open-sourced in 2015 under the Apache 2.0 license, fostering a vibrant community and enabling its use beyond Apple's ecosystem on platforms like Linux and Windows, and for server-side development with frameworks like Vapor.

Interoperability with Objective-C: Swift can be seamlessly integrated into existing Objective-C projects, allowing developers to gradually transition or combine the two languages within the same application.