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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?

#111

Post by Reason077 »

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.

> “Swift is … not an app-development language.”

Huh? As compared to Objective-C, with Swift you generally get more done with less boilerplate, less repetition, and certainly far less semi-colons and square brackets.

If you consider ObjC to be an app-development language, I can’t really imagine how Swift can’t be one?

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

#112

Post by wahnfrieden »

bkdbkd wrote: post #88
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…

former Mac dev here, and completely agreed. Refactoring an app because someone else decided to change the language is a bridge to far. And if they do it this time, they'll do it again. Meanwhile the ObjC compiles. --- Rant - With Swift Apple shifted dev power to themselves. Having gotten fat on the open world, they've backed away from every 'Open' technology they can, and replaced it with their own, ( presently all t…

Foundation is now open source at least

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

#114

Post by kalleboo »

runjake wrote: post #92
spacemadness wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elegance. I keep hearing that from obj-c devs and I really don’t understand what is so elegant about it. Maybe it’s more to do with familiarity? I find swift much easier to deal with and more “elegant” to read.

It's subjective, but from my viewpoint, the message passing and it's relative simplicity and readability, compared to Swift. I can completely see why people would think the opposite, though.

Message passing is neat, but every time I saw someone take advantage of its flexibility, it was a mess.

E.g. there was a Flickr API library that directly translated the message names into API calls. Very neat, but now a typo stops being a compiler error and becomes a failed API call.

Mostly it was used to bypass Apple's private API App Store restrictions by obfuscating message names in rot13 or something.

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

#115

Post by Tagbert »

bkdbkd wrote: post #88
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…

former Mac dev here, and completely agreed. Refactoring an app because someone else decided to change the language is a bridge to far. And if they do it this time, they'll do it again. Meanwhile the ObjC compiles. --- Rant - With Swift Apple shifted dev power to themselves. Having gotten fat on the open world, they've backed away from every 'Open' technology they can, and replaced it with their own, ( presently all t…

Yes, but it is common for new languages and frameworks for there to be lots of change in the first few version. Then it matures and settles down. AFAIK Swift is not regularly making large changes, anymore.

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

#116

Post by ryanar »

Tagbert wrote: post #115
bkdbkd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

former Mac dev here, and completely agreed. Refactoring an app because someone else decided to change the language is a bridge to far. And if they do it this time, they'll do it again. Meanwhile the ObjC compiles. --- Rant - With Swift Apple shifted dev power to themselves. Having gotten fat on the open world, they've backed away from every 'Open' technology they can, and replaced it with their own, ( presently all t…

Yes, but it is common for new languages and frameworks for there to be lots of change in the first few version. Then it matures and settles down. AFAIK Swift is not regularly making large changes, anymore.

Go wasn’t that way, in some respects it is a language design choice whether you want to retain compatibility

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

#117

Post by lukeh »

I'm enjoying Swift, particularly the async/await APIs. I think it would be difficult to write asynchronous code in Objective-C (well, there would be a lot of completion handlers). My present case is the control plane for an embedded application and I don't really have too many complaints. I like the package management system. It would be nice if the compiler was faster.

I maintain some other code that is a mix of Swift, Objective-C and C. I'd happily rewrite the Objective-C components in Swift (except there's no reason to, as it works).

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

#118

Post by NoPedantsThanks »

sandofsky wrote: post #57
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…

As a counter-anecdote from someone who also runs their own company, I began dabbling in Swift in 2014. I held off on full Swift adoption until after the big API renaming that happened with Swift 3, so language migrations haven’t been a big deal. The compiler is slower, but I can still do a clean build in 43 seconds. Maybe I’ve had a good experience because I’m not working on a FAANG project with a million lines of co…

I built an iOS app alone, from the ground up, in Objective-C. This was after I left Apple, where I mostly used C++. I hated Objective-C less than I expected, and the app was functional and reliable.

Then I built an iOS app for a consumer-electronics company alone, from the ground up. I learned Swift and wrote the whole app in it. I liked it a lot. Once I had the language down, I was very productive and able to implement almost any change that management requested in a few days at most.

SwiftUI, however, is a very different story. It's a half-assed, often brain-dead environment that has made building my own application from the ground up PAINFUL. Not only has it taken months to do what should have taken weeks, but SwiftUI and the attempted "reactive" paradigm it's supposedly optimized for are so full of holes that Apple's recommended practices simply don't work. "One source of truth" my ass; SwiftUI and the absurdly incomplete observation framework it relies on make that impossible.

I usually blame myself for just not having read enough, but with SwiftUI my research has far too often concluded with a finding that, "Oh yeah, that doesn't work."

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

#119

Post by Reason077 »

troupo wrote: post #63
ironlake wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that perspective. I haven't done any MacOS development.

Since Swift UI is iOS-first, when the apps get ported to MacOS, they bring a lot of mobile-isms: the views and animations are often wrong, the controls are often wrong (like even the Apple's own settings app breaks a lot of established platform conventions and Apple's own HIGs), integration with system services is often incomplete (like proper keyboard shortcuts, I can't set a shortcut for Conversations->Delete in Me…

> "people discuss that they have to reach for AppKit and/or ditch SwiftUI and got all in with AppKit, and that is easier to do from Obj-C."

You can fairly easily port UIKit apps to macOS now with Mac Catalyst[1] No need to use SwiftUI to get those mobile-isms.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/mac-catalyst/

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

#120

Post by markemer »

There isn’t a ton of work being done in ObjC anymore. I’ve interviewed quite a few junior iOS developer candidates that didn’t even know it. There are some holdouts, of course.

As I’ve been doing Mac/iOS programming since the retain release days, ObjC has a place in my heart, but swift is a decade old now (was announced 10 years ago this WWDC) and is pretty much the app language of choice.

Now that the ABI stabilized, even binary library authors are getting in on it.

Newer stuff like SwiftUI and SwiftData you might want to wait on, but Swift is pretty much most of what I’m up to these days.

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