Swift sees huge decline, thanks to multiplatform languages like Xamarin

Apple debuted Swift programming language back in 2014 as the successor to Objective-C. Since then developers have been trying their hands-on the language for mobile development. Unfortunately, this didn’t last long as developers are moving away from Swift.

According to a recent report from TIOBE Index, developers are preferring multi-platform languages like C# (Xamarin) and JavaScript (Apache Cordova and Ionic). For those unaware, TIOBE Index indicates the popularity of programming languages on a monthly basis.

The updated report shows JAVA on top followed by C and C++, and Objective-C with Swift has been pushed down 19th and 20th spot respectively. This is a massive drop for Swift since it was at 12th position last month.

Until recently, it was quite common to program Android apps in Java and iOS apps in Swift/Objective-C. This is quite cumbersome because you have to maintain two code bases that are doing almost the same [thing].

– Paul Jansen, CEO Tiobe

The biggest cause of this drop in rankings for Swift is that it focuses completely on the Apple ecosystem, unlike others which work on multiple platforms. Although there have been talks of getting Swift on Android but Google is completely focused on JAVA and C++ for Android development.

Swift did manage to get on the 10th position on The PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language Index. This index is the alternate to TIOBE Index and works by ranking the languages by how often their tutorials are searched on Google.

If sustained this may provide a crack in the application dominance on iOS, where that OS traditionally has better apps first and may give a boost to competing operating systems such as Android and Windows.

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Via: InfoWorld