Question 1

True or false: Swift was originally designed by Chris Lattner while he worked at Apple, starting in 2010.

Accepted Answer

True. Chris Lattner began developing Swift in mid-2010, and it debuted at WWDC 2014. It was a ground-up redesign for modern programming.

Question 2

True or false: Swift's String type is actually a struct, not a class, which improves performance and mutability control.

Accepted Answer

True. Unlike Objective-C's NSString (a class), Swift's String is a value type struct, enabling copy-on-write optimization and thread safety.

Question 3

True or false: Swift uses automatic reference counting, but it also has a built-in garbage collector as a fallback.

Accepted Answer

False. Swift uses ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) exclusively, not garbage collection. ARC is deterministic, while GC runs unpredictably in the background.

Question 4

True or false: Swift playgrounds can be used to build fully functional iOS apps directly on an iPad.

Accepted Answer

True. Swift Playgrounds on iPad allows building and running real apps with SwiftUI, including deployment to the App Store, not just learning.

Question 5

True or false: In Swift, all numeric types automatically promote to Double during arithmetic to prevent overflow.

Accepted Answer

False. Swift does not do implicit type conversion between numeric types (e.g., Int + Double is an error). You must explicitly cast using constructors.

Question 6

True or false: Swift has built-in support for regular expressions via the Regex type, introduced in Swift 5.7.

Accepted Answer

True. Swift 5.7 added Regex literals (e.g., /pattern/) and a dedicated Regex type, making pattern matching part of the standard library.

Question 7

True or false: Swift cannot interoperate with C or C++ code directly; it only works with Objective-C.

Accepted Answer

False. Swift can call C functions and even C++ code via the Swift/C++ interop introduced in Swift 5.9, though it’s less seamless than Objective-C.

Question 8

True or false: Swift supports full dynamic dispatch by default for all methods, just like Objective-C.

Accepted Answer

False. Swift favors static or virtual dispatch by default for performance. Dynamic dispatch requires the 'dynamic' keyword or @objc attribute.

Swift programming language Trivia Questions