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Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?

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Re: Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?

#101

Post by askafriend »

dinkblam wrote: post #42
lapcat wrote: post #17

I use Objective-C exclusively (no Swift) in my App Store apps. I wrote a Swift app for a hobby/free project a few years ago and regretted it. They changed the language and deprecated some of my code, which isn't easily replaceable without a significant rewrite. The project now compiles only in Swift 4 and will die when Swift 4 support is removed from Xcode. I see no reason to use Swift. The compiler is slower and bug…

absolutely the same here. the problem with Swift is that it is a systems programming language and not an app-development language. far to cumbersome, complicated and unproductive for writing apps.

What's an example of an app development language?

Re: Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?

#102

Post by jakey_bakey »

AnonC wrote: post #71
runjake wrote: post #35

I've given up on Apple platform development, but I strongly prefer Objective-C over Swift for a variety of reasons, including elegance, compatibility, stability, etc. It's important to note that there's still tons of Objective-C written inside Apple to this day, perhaps more than Swift. What Apple pushes as what you should be using is often not what they are using internally, FWIW. Third-party developers are its true…

> It's important to note that there's still tons of Objective-C written inside Apple to this day, perhaps more than Swift. I don’t know if this is true or not, but Apple certainly isn’t writing its own end-user applications with good macOS technologies and support (which means it’s not using Objective C and Cocoa). Apps like Reminders, Notes, Photos and others on macOS seem and behave like poorly ported versions of a…

In user space perhaps, but the OS is very heavily ObjC (and C)

Someone posted a great analysis breaking down how many binaries used which language in iOS through the years

Re: Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?

#103

Post by fluffyspork »

Over the past couple of weeks I wrote a macos/ios app with objc and c. It's like a 2d game with most code in C which is also used on Linux. Draws the whole view with MTKView and uses udp with bsd sockets.

I mainly chose it for the c interoperability and I don't have any interest in swift.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?

#104

Post by raydev »

Whether you're starting a new app as an individual or a 5-or-15-or-100-or-1000 person team, I don't see why anyone would *not* choose Swift in 2024, unless they are doing game or 3d/VR/AR graphics development, in which case you would augment with C++ probably.

All of Apple's new APIs will be Swift-friendly or Swift-exclusive, no reason to actively use anything else unless your personal preference overrides.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?

#105

Post by Suppafly »

sandofsky wrote: post #62
dinkblam wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

absolutely the same here. the problem with Swift is that it is a systems programming language and not an app-development language. far to cumbersome, complicated and unproductive for writing apps.

What makes it a systems language and not an app-development language?

different buzzwords

Re: Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?

#106

Post by lawgimenez »

lapcat wrote: post #99
sandofsky wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Ben, don't play coy and pretend you weren't trollling when it's 100% clear now that you're trolling, and everyone can see that. I'm done here.

Just figured that dude you respond to is the one who created Halide camera. Not expecting him of a troll type, until today.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?

#107

Post by inejge »

jdewerd wrote: post #53
FanaHOVA wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not aimed at you particularly, but I've noticed more and more of the technical discussion on HN turn into "I don't really use it, but here's my many years old experience / non-user observation", which is mostly just confusing to people trying to leadn. You don't need to justify op with old anecdotes, people want to know what the issues are today, if any. At least that's what makes this website valuable for me.

Do you expect people to periodically repeat failed experiments just so they can provide you with up to date information? You are always free to ignore it. In any case, this particular observation is timeless: language bridges always have trolls under them. Maybe your project can get away with using the bridge anyway, but maybe a highly critical API gets locked out because the bridge deals poorly with variadic argumen…

Do you expect people to periodically repeat failed experiments just so they can provide you with up to date information?

Not OP, and I for one don't, but noting the age of the reported experience would be valuable. I have also noticed the "stale cache" problem. It leads to confusion and misunderstanding.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?

#108

Post by bsaul »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #33

I don't, but know many that do. I'll bet almost all AAA apps are still ObjC, and I know that Apple still uses it, in-house, for a lot of their stuff. I write my Apple stuff exclusively in Swift, and don't bridge to C. I have been doing that, since 2014. Before that, I wrote in ObjC. I still use UIKit/AppKit/WatchKit for my shipping apps, though. I do not believe that SwiftUI is ready yet, for the scope of my work (I…

Curious : what made you stay away from swiftui ? Care to give examples ? (I’m investigating swiftui for my current project)

Re: Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?

#109

Post by Atotalnoob »

QuercusMax wrote: post #91
spike021 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could probably say the same about most large public orgs. For instance many Amazon teams don't even use modern AWS internally for their services. At least as of three years ago.

At Google, it's really hard to use GCP for first-party products due to all the security lockdowns.

What’s the justification for security lockdowns versus what they use internally?

Re: Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?

#110

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

bsaul wrote: post #108
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #33

I don't, but know many that do. I'll bet almost all AAA apps are still ObjC, and I know that Apple still uses it, in-house, for a lot of their stuff. I write my Apple stuff exclusively in Swift, and don't bridge to C. I have been doing that, since 2014. Before that, I wrote in ObjC. I still use UIKit/AppKit/WatchKit for my shipping apps, though. I do not believe that SwiftUI is ready yet, for the scope of my work (I…

Curious : what made you stay away from swiftui ? Care to give examples ? (I’m investigating swiftui for my current project)

In this case, it was the way that maps are being handled. My stuff tends to be heavily location-dependent, and I go to great lengths, to make my map UI extremely usable.

The problem is in the way that the binding and the observable stuff works (or doesn't). If the design is the basic text-layout stuff, it works great. Better than great. Having come from a device control background, the reactive/observable model is one I have no problem with.

However, whenever you have a complex interaction, like a map that can be modified from a number of directions and data sources, things go a bit pear-shaped.

I spent four days, trying to get the map to do what I needed it to (something that takes a day, in UIKit), and gave up.

I suspect that it would not have worked cross-platform, anyway, which is why I was interested in SwiftUI.

This is a typical complaint that I've heard. It's really difficult to stray from the beaten path in SwiftUI, and folks don't figure that out, until they have already invested a lot of time into it.

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