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Swift Regrets

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Re: Swift Regrets

#31

Post by sedatk »

tathisit wrote: post #25
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #4

I don’t know if this is Swift’s fault, per se but I find Xcode to be a real pain to use. There’s something about the Apple Way for UI/UX that just doesn’t jive well with an IDE experience. I find myself constantly jockeying around the various windows and panes within Xcode that I usually never have to bother with inside of Visual Studio.

Not an apple user, but I've heard that xcode is an ide+build system. Which means that you can't compile an application if you don't have the exact version of xcode installed. How true is that?

They're part of Xcode package but they can also be installed separately IIRC.

Re: Swift Regrets

#32

Post by kitsunesoba »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #4

I don’t know if this is Swift’s fault, per se but I find Xcode to be a real pain to use. There’s something about the Apple Way for UI/UX that just doesn’t jive well with an IDE experience. I find myself constantly jockeying around the various windows and panes within Xcode that I usually never have to bother with inside of Visual Studio.

Probably depends a good deal on what you're used to. By far, the IDE I've spent most time in through my career is Xcode (or its predecessor Project Builder) and have found it's not too bad once you've got a grip on the things it doesn't "like".

In fact I enjoy working in it more than I do the much-vaunted Jetbrains IDEs, even when configured to use Xcode key shortcuts (thus short-circuiting the familiarity problem a bit). The faster autocomplete is nice, but a lot of the "smarter" parts end up getting in my way or doing the wrong thing more frequently than they are helpful. I can't really compare with Visual Studio since I've never really seriously developed for Microsoft platforms.

I will say though that Xcode got noticeably worse after Interface Builder got merged into it, and I think much of its woes stem from that merger even today. IB should've been left a separate tool, which is particularly evident now that XIBs and Storyboards are yielding to SwiftUI in the nearish future.

Re: Swift Regrets

#33

Post by zozbot234 »

jshier wrote: post #29
novok wrote: post #24

I'm surprised he doesn't bring up minor features that lead to huge compile time issues, like operator overloading and imports being module sized vs file or folder wide and type inference in some cases. Not to mention how the language doesn't actually scale that well with core count vs. many, many other programming languages. Throwing 64 cores / 128 threads at a C++ code base speeds up builds in a linear fashion durin…

The main point of Swift was to create a memory-safe language Apple could use across its OSes. Trying to change Obj-C's syntax doesn't help with that goal.

Swift does not provide memory safety for concurrent code. It has comparable pitfalls to Go. (You can use Thread Sanitizer to try and diagnose these issues, but that's best-effort and runtime-only; it does not make your code totally safe.)

Re: Swift Regrets

#34

Post by novok »

jshier wrote: post #29
novok wrote: post #24

I'm surprised he doesn't bring up minor features that lead to huge compile time issues, like operator overloading and imports being module sized vs file or folder wide and type inference in some cases. Not to mention how the language doesn't actually scale that well with core count vs. many, many other programming languages. Throwing 64 cores / 128 threads at a C++ code base speeds up builds in a linear fashion durin…

The main point of Swift was to create a memory-safe language Apple could use across its OSes. Trying to change Obj-C's syntax doesn't help with that goal.

What do you mean specifically about memory safety? A clean break new-syntax Objective C could have dropped the C part of ObjC, added strict nullability, dropped header files, add non ABI breaking features like enum ADTs and a bunch of other tweaks and still kept most of the same language compiler code without all the downsides of swift. Swift became a silver bullet homer car as far as languages go.

Re: Swift Regrets

#35

Post by jshier »

novok wrote: post #28
jshier wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just isn't true. Given equal familiarity, Swift will be vastly more productive at any skill level. Of course you can always tunnel deeper into more sophisticated solutions using Swift, since Obj-C lacks most of its capabilities, but that's hardly an equal comparison.

I have a lot of experience in both languages, and TBH it's just not true. I'm less productive in swift in many ways, mostly because of it's slow build and indexing times. It's infuriating. You are still coding against the same UIKit and other apple libraries in both. SwiftUI has a chance to make it better, but it's incomplete and has bugs/gotchas that make it not as productive as UIKit when you run into that, which i…

It would be impossible to evolve Obj-C to add most of Swift's capabilities unless you drop binary and source back compatibility. At that point it's just another new language and you've lost the things you say made Obj-C simpler.

I have a hard time believing any engineer is productivity bound by Swift's build times and especially indexing times, since indexing doesn't affect your ability actually write code. Typically developer productivity is bound by thinking of an appropriate solution to a problem and expressing that solution in a language. Given how much easier that expression is in Swift, especially if you spend a bit of time optimizing the language to your problem, the build time becomes rather incidental. Add to that Swift's ability to catch far more issues at build time and its language features and the Obj-C solution falls further and further behind. Even if your Obj-C solution builds faster it will likely be an inferior solution anyway.

Re: Swift Regrets

#36

Post by kitsunesoba »

dhritzkiv wrote: post #22
rapsey wrote: post #7

Before Swift/Kotlin our iOS team was way more productive than android. Everything was done in half the time. They both switched to new languages. Now it has flipped. Android does things in half the time the other team needs.

I've found similar results, although at the end of the day, iOS development is still faster overall. Kotlin does a better job of getting out of the way when you need it to (compared to Swift), and Jetpack Compose is the real game-changer in terms of productivity. That being said, there's a lot that you 'get for free' in iOS' frameworks, and APIs are generally more interoperable / batteries included. Both of these fac…

I haven't had a chance to use Jetpack Compose yet but this roughly tracks with my experience. Needing to hunt down third-party libs for everything slows development down considerably and makes for complications down the road when those libraries inevitably stop being supported.

Re: Swift Regrets

#37

Post by jshier »

rapsey wrote: post #26
jshier wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this sounds like a tooling issue. I have no difficultly believing Kotlin + Android Studio might be faster or more reliable than Swift + Xcode. Hard to say with any certainty though, it could be any number of things, if the perceived difference is even real.

From my outside looking in perspective: * Android studio is reliable and just works. * Kotlin is simple, easy to learn and productive. * xcode is buggy and with their rapid pace of development it is just getting worse. * Swift is complex. They had to rethink and redesign multiple times. Also the language was constantly changing under them.

Swift hasn't changed much in the last 2.5 years, and was stable for the year before that, so it really shouldn't be an issue any more.

Re: Swift Regrets

#38

Post by diskzero »

jshier wrote: post #23
ardit33 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A well jelled team, with senior engineers can be much more productive with Objective C. But for beginners, swift looks less intimidating due to its syntax familiarity. The language pitfalls become apparent as you dive into it. Perhaps that’s why swift in ML and other areas failed. People don’t like the language. In iOS you are forced to use it. I hope the swift team does some hard thinking and start slashing features…

This just isn't true. Given equal familiarity, Swift will be vastly more productive at any skill level. Of course you can always tunnel deeper into more sophisticated solutions using Swift, since Obj-C lacks most of its capabilities, but that's hardly an equal comparison.

I have a rather complex application that is a mix of C++, ObjC and Swift. I humbly consider myself an expert in all three languages and worked on AppKit while employed at Apple. Perhaps Swift is slightly more accessible when you begin development. If you aren't familiar with ObjC syntax, Swift my look more familiar at first, but syntax quickly becomes familiar.

When you mention more sophisticated solutions using Swift, I am not sure what capabilities Obj-C lacks that would hamper it. Are you referring to the functional parts of the Swift language? Combine?

Re: Swift Regrets

#39

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

msoad wrote: post #2

Swift has way too many shorthand syntaxes. It feels nice from a language design perspective but when teaching Swift, you can see how confusing it is for the students. In larger codebases a lot of shorthands are forbidden by the organizations for consistency. So I'm not sure who's the real beneficiary for all those shorthands?

> So I'm not sure who's the real beneficiary for all those shorthands?

Coffee shop and college project app developers who are chasing the cool (be it tricks or frameworks).

That’s not a knock, but that’s who I see using these things.

We were hiring a guy for a Flutter app that had no previous experience in Dart, but turned us down because Dart lacked some whiz bang feature he had too grown accustomed to. I did not see this as a loss.

Re: Swift Regrets

#40

Post by jshier »

ardit33 wrote: post #30
jshier wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just isn't true. Given equal familiarity, Swift will be vastly more productive at any skill level. Of course you can always tunnel deeper into more sophisticated solutions using Swift, since Obj-C lacks most of its capabilities, but that's hardly an equal comparison.

You are talking out of your arse… and so am I. Unless we have well researched data, it is just a opinion. My opinion and experience is definitely different than yours, and I have seen that objective c leads to more productive teams if they are mostly senior people. (With a couple of libraries (just some helper categories on strings and arrays) and some sparse macros objective c becomes a very productive language. But…

These are the same stupid points people brought up when Swift was first released. I used to believe it too. Then I actually used the language and integrated it into existing codebases. The jump in quality and performance was notable and immediate. What you state here about both languages doesn't match any experience I've ever had or seen from other teams.
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