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What’s new in Swift 6.2

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Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#141

Post by panic »

travisgriggs wrote: post #63

Honest question. Not trying to troll. One of the pitches in the earlier days was “C/Objective-C OK, but you can’t write safe/next level code with it—-Swift will close that gap.” N years later, it doesn’t feel like there has been a step change in Apple software quality; if anything Apple software feels less solid, and looks cool “look what I did” extension points. I mean, some of the tings you could do with runtime ca…

Swift wasn't designed to solve any of the problems Apple engineers had writing customer-facing software. It was a shiny new language which could be marketed to third parties as something modern and familiar, unlike Objective-C with its odd mix of C and square brackets.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#142

Post by ksec »

travisgriggs wrote: post #63

Honest question. Not trying to troll. One of the pitches in the earlier days was “C/Objective-C OK, but you can’t write safe/next level code with it—-Swift will close that gap.” N years later, it doesn’t feel like there has been a step change in Apple software quality; if anything Apple software feels less solid, and looks cool “look what I did” extension points. I mean, some of the tings you could do with runtime ca…

I have been skeptical of Swift ever since I heard the original goal was the one language to rule them all from Assembly to Javascript. When something is too good to be true it probably is. But I have also given Apple plenty of benefits of doubt.

It seems Swift 6.2 is still unfinished and is acting more like Java. Eternal evolution of language. While it is popular among tech and HN crowds to have new language and framework to play around and work. It brings particular little if not negative user experience in terms of final products. I often wonder if Apple could just have some light touches of improvement on Objective-C in the past 10 - 12 years and instead focuses on actual OS and Apps quality.

It is this lack of focus that has been with Apple since Steve Jobs left.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#143

Post by iamcalledrob »

monkeyelite wrote: post #102
sedatk wrote: post #29

Free-form identifiers are neat for test-case naming, but not for `HTTPStatus.`404``. I think having `HTTPStatus.Error404` was a bad idea to begin with. Just use semantic names like `HTTPStatus.NotFound` and you wouldn't have a problem in the first place. Now, a single character typo can easily make a 404, 403 and create a bug. It's less of a problem with semantic names. If you want constrained numeric types in Swift,…

> case _401 or case error401. I'm not seeing why it's worth a whole language feature to avoid prefixing strange identifiers.

I think this is kind of indicative of the Swift approach: if in doubt, add language features that make code look nicer.

Not a fan personally, but Swift is littered with little "niceties" (complexities) like this.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#144

Post by wiseowise »

nulld3v wrote: post #46
90s_dev wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just seems to me that this is the exactly wrong way to solve a programming problem. If the problem boils down to "I want some variables (almost always test function names) to be more human readable", the solution should never be "hey let's add this feature to the core language and make identifiers use any ASCII string! I dunno, maybe I'm wrong here and being overly critical. But to me it just screams "Swift has lo…

Many languages have had this feature for a long time. Ruby, ~~Rust,~~ Kotlin, etc... It hasn't been an issue at all. I like that most languages seem to have reached consensus on backticks or other similarily awkward characters for this feature. Typing these identifiers is like hitting a speed bump, which seems to be enough to make devs avoid them except for very specific use-cases.

The issue is that it’s not a problem in the first place.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#145

Post by krzat »

ardit33 wrote: post #94
elcritch wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same. Apple software quality certainly hasn’t increased . Years back I remember some apps crashing suddenly after updating MacOS. I checked the binary and saw they’d started adding Swift. Half a decade later it seems like it should be better and Swift stuff should be stabilized. But nope, I’ve had more little glitches in both iOS and MacOS. It’s hard to say it’s due to Swift, and not management priorities.…

It is not just the language but the frameworks. SwiftUI is a wreck, and still not mature even after 6-7+ years in 'production'. You still have to drop to UIKit to do advanced UI, and for what it is, SwiftUI is just not practical enough for cases that are not trivial. The trouble is that all new kids/engineer are learning it first, which means software wont get better. Apple need to improve it first, and I don't see a…

What baffles me the most is testability of SwiftUI. It simply does not exist.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#146

Post by saagarjha »

ksec wrote: post #142
travisgriggs wrote: post #63

Honest question. Not trying to troll. One of the pitches in the earlier days was “C/Objective-C OK, but you can’t write safe/next level code with it—-Swift will close that gap.” N years later, it doesn’t feel like there has been a step change in Apple software quality; if anything Apple software feels less solid, and looks cool “look what I did” extension points. I mean, some of the tings you could do with runtime ca…

I have been skeptical of Swift ever since I heard the original goal was the one language to rule them all from Assembly to Javascript. When something is too good to be true it probably is. But I have also given Apple plenty of benefits of doubt. It seems Swift 6.2 is still unfinished and is acting more like Java. Eternal evolution of language. While it is popular among tech and HN crowds to have new language and fram…

Objective-C being stuck in the 1990s forever was not necessarily a good thing.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#148

Post by saagarjha »

rockbruno wrote: post #134
w10-1 wrote: post #31

The article doesn’t give enough attention to the glacial but steady changes in the ownership model that will have great benefit in avoiding copies in value types, Swift’s strength and Achilles heel. I have to say Paul Hudson has almost single-handedly taken over communicating the essentials of Swift to the world; he’s fantastically reliable, brief but enthusiastic, guiding people around the many pitfalls.

Agree on Paul Hudson being great, but not so much on the guiding around the pitfalls. One big issue with the Swift community in general in my opinion is that a lot of the community content is incredibly shallow. Most of them are fine with "there's this feature and you can do X with it, cool right?" style-content, meaning very few people actually take the time to explain what the trade-offs are / performance considera…

I think one of the problems is that the people who are actually using the language features generally don't have time to do it, Apple doesn't do it themselves, and Paul Hudson has 300 new features a year to view. Plus, iOS developers cargo cult harder than any other programming community I've come across, and this generally doesn't work really well if your explanation is difficult to quickly convey.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#149

Post by saagarjha »

rcruzeiro wrote: post #90
wsc981 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find 'simple' languages charming. Hence, I still like Objective-C. I also like Lua a lot. I liked Swift when I tried it a couple of years ago, but it seems overloaded with features these days. I haven't tried Swift UI yet, but I did think the Objective-C approach with xibs, struts and such worked fine.

xibs were an absolute nightmare if you worked with a team. Even in the Objective-C days a lot of developers were sticking with programatic layout to avoid xibs. Google even had this mandated in their Objective-C style guide.

Google's style guide is usually not a great reference if you want to write a language that they didn't make. But yes, XIBs kind of suck.

Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2

#150

Post by saagarjha »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #106
rcruzeiro wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xibs were an absolute nightmare if you worked with a team. Even in the Objective-C days a lot of developers were sticking with programatic layout to avoid xibs. Google even had this mandated in their Objective-C style guide.

On iOS, code-only UIKit with bits of SwiftUI interspersed for simple components (think collection view cells) is definitely the way to go. UIKit is well equipped to be written that way (unlike Android Framework, which practically forces use of XML layouts in many cases). For Mac dev, AppKit is still fairly heavily weighted towards use of XIBs, but it’s not nearly as much of an issue there because on average each indi…

FWIW Android's XML layout is actually pleasant to use (though Jetpack Compose is also quite good).
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