9 years of Apple text editor solo dev • Hacker News Board

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#111

Post by lovelyviking » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 3:40 PM UTC

KMnO4 wrote: post #47

Alifatisk wrote: post #6

> To my surprise, the Swift one had the full Swift runtime embedded into it — about 5MB, while the Objective-C one was super light — tens or maybe 100KB in total. That's a huge difference, but I believe it's because Swift is meant to be somewhat cross-platform, right?

That experiment was done in 2015, when the Swift runtime had to be included. If you build an app now, it will link to the system runtime and be close to 100kb as well. This seems to be premature optimization. The author forced himself to learn archaic Objective C for a completely unnecessary reason, and now is stuck with that design choice despite not having any benefits.

May be you can point out a few particular features of swift that would bring real advantages for his project?

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#112

Post by imbnwa » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 3:41 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #94

> Swift has come a long way and my guess is Apple has either embedded it into their platforms or added some fancy tree shaking for the binary. It went ABI around Swift 5 or so. I took a huge leap of faith, in 2014, and started using Swift, exclusively. It's turned out OK. I'm not quite as positive about SwiftUI, though. I think it will work out, but it has a huge amount of catching up to do, if it is to replace UIKit…

I follow the development of Swiftcord, A SwiftUI Discord client, on the developer's discord, and they almost constantly lambast how much is apparently missing or unstable between AppKit and the current version of SwiftUI, which has made it a struggle to get to feature parity with the official Discord client based on Electron cause lots of things you expect either have to be implemented by hand or just can't be done IIRC.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#113

Post by ioslipstream » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 3:42 PM UTC

ubermonkey wrote: post #64

[flagged]

The app is free. In fact you don't miss much by not paying the subscription.

Pro features are $10/month, but are actually also "free" via an unlimited time trial.

The $10/month price tag is to support the developer if you're so inclined, which includes some nice-to-have features.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#114

Post by papereditor » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 3:44 PM UTC

jbperry wrote: post #97

mattlondon wrote: post #74

[flagged]

I honestly thought that the scrollbar didn't work at all until I read this comment. If I put the site on my right monitor, I can grab the scrollbar by just going to the edge. But on my left monitor, where I typically have the browser, it's almost impossible. I too find it very annoying, especially for such a long article.

Sorry, I'll try to make it more accessible.

It expands in the app as you hover over it. Probably needs a similar thing for the website.

Or I just need to give up and revert it to the standard one. :)

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#115

Post by neontomo » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 3:44 PM UTC

I've been using an app called Left for simple text editing, but I think I prefer this one.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#116

Post by lapcat » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 3:47 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #94

> Swift has come a long way and my guess is Apple has either embedded it into their platforms or added some fancy tree shaking for the binary. It went ABI around Swift 5 or so. I took a huge leap of faith, in 2014, and started using Swift, exclusively. It's turned out OK. I'm not quite as positive about SwiftUI, though. I think it will work out, but it has a huge amount of catching up to do, if it is to replace UIKit…

> I'd be quite interested in Rich Siegel's take (the guy behind BBEdit). He's been at it, a while, as well.

Looking inside the BBEdit app, I see some Swift in BBEdit.app/Contents/Frameworks/CandiedYams.framework, which appears to be a third-party framework (CFBundleIdentifier org.darkrainfall.candied-yams), but not much else.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#117

Post by jshier » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 3:48 PM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #109

jshier wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're literally rewriting in Swift right now. Foundation is being rewritten entirely in Swift. All new code is in Swift. All new frameworks are Swift-only. They're using Swift from low level firmware on the Secure Enclave to apps. This is already real.

> Foundation is being rewritten entirely in Swift. That's a mult-year project in its very early stages, yet we're already almost 10 years into Swift (more than 10 years of Swift internally to Apple). > All new code is in Swift. False. > All new frameworks are Swift-only. False.

> That's a mult-year project in its very early stages, yet we're already almost 10 years into Swift (more than 10 years of Swift internally to Apple).

It has already shipped, replacing parts of Foundation in the 2023 OS versions. It continues to grow, and it's a rewrite, so it certainly proves your assertion wrong.

My other points were a bit hyperbolic. Feel free the replace "all" with "the vast majority of". Apple obviously still writes Obj-C in their existing Obj-C frameworks, and doesn't arbitrarily rewrite into Swift, but their internal barriers to use Swift are now almost entirely gone. And I can't think of an entirely new framework that wasn't Swift-only recently.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#118

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 3:49 PM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #116

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #94

> Swift has come a long way and my guess is Apple has either embedded it into their platforms or added some fancy tree shaking for the binary. It went ABI around Swift 5 or so. I took a huge leap of faith, in 2014, and started using Swift, exclusively. It's turned out OK. I'm not quite as positive about SwiftUI, though. I think it will work out, but it has a huge amount of catching up to do, if it is to replace UIKit…

> I'd be quite interested in Rich Siegel's take (the guy behind BBEdit). He's been at it, a while, as well. Looking inside the BBEdit app, I see some Swift in BBEdit.app/Contents/Frameworks/CandiedYams.framework, which appears to be a third-party framework (CFBundleIdentifier org.darkrainfall.candied-yams), but not much else.

Not surprising.

I've been using BBEdit for about thirty years. It's been through many changes. I suspect that he's pretty conservative.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#119

Post by bilekas » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 3:50 PM UTC

> I had little trust in my ability to pick the right dependencies from an ecosystem that I was not familiar with

For me this is an invaluable lesson to learn. A pet peeve of mine are tutorials or guides which consist of a list of external packages and libraries to add before writing a line of code.

This write up is excellent though, some of the gripes I have with the Apple eco system the OP has turned into a 'learning' experience in a positive way. Really nice.

Re: 9 years of Apple text editor solo dev

#120

Post by imbnwa » Fri, Jan 05, 2024, 3:51 PM UTC

I'd been thinking of getting into Apple platform dev, but there really seems to be this strong contradiction in people saying to go full bore Swift/SwiftUI but reading this and as well following the Swiftcord devs' discord, there's a lot of problems with Swift/SwiftUI as a replacement for Obj-C/UIKit/AppKit. There also seems to be more and better documentation/examples for the Obj-C APIs than Swift; yes Obj-C is old, but Apple has been ringing the bell that this is the future for years now. How do you pick one to know you can just get things done, no matter what the requirements?