Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Swift or Objective-C?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 27 posts

Re: Ask HN: Swift or Objective-C?

#7

Post by seivan »

bribri wrote: post #3

Swift is a better language in almost every way but you should still know Objective-C if you want to work professionally.

Not when working with C++ libs as of today. Even working with C is a bit of a pain. Apart from that, yeah go full Swift.

Re: Ask HN: Swift or Objective-C?

#8

Post by seivan »

davismwfl wrote: post #5
andymoe wrote: post #2

Swift for new stuff.

What do you feel is the primary or greatest benefits of using swift? I get it is the new way but is it that much more productive, easier, flexible or?

Safety and builtin encapsulation. No more included properties in inplementation files. :-).

Re: Ask HN: Swift or Objective-C?

#9

Post by sparky_ »

I'll take the counter-point here and vote for Objective-C. Swift has not reached a level of maturity that we're comfortable with it for mission-critical code. Each Xcode revision brings breaking changes which require you to address manually, as the migrator is lacking. Interop with Obj-C works OK - not great - but with pure C, it's a hassle. And the libraries and tools around Swift are just nowhere near as mature as they are for Obj-C... even first party; case in point, Xcode cannot even rename methods or extract constants from Swift code. No refactoring capability at all.

Having built several large apps which are live in the Store in both languages, I'm sticking with Obj-C for 2016. Give Swift another year before going all in.

Post reply on HN