read news about rust and swift these days, it seems modern c++ might keep its dominance for the future
What’s new in Swift 6.2
171–180 of 258 posts
Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2
#172Swift is collapsing under the weight of its increasing complexity. So many, many special cases & they keep adding more! As a developer it becomes so very hard to reason about code behaviour. This is especially true with concurrency, which was meant to simplify concurrent operations, but in actual fact is a nasty can of worms. In an effort to "hide the complexity" it just introduces a huge amount of unexpected & hard…
Swift's become so feature-heavy, and complex, whilst the documentation is all over the place. That's not even counting things like SwiftUI, or its rather arcane CLI tooling.
Out of curiosity, I put in more than 150 genuine hours in 2024, trying to get deeply into Swift - and eventually just abandoned the language.
In comparison - I got very far experimenting with Go in the same amount of time.
Unless one needs to get into the Mac ecosystem, I see no reason why learning Swift should be necessary at all.
Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2
#173Honest 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…
Good code is just one of many ingredients to great software, and programming language is a small factor in good code.
Swift was never going to make Apple software great (nor Go or Rust or anything else for anyone else).
Though, honestly, if you're thinking about computer languages in terms of cool, you're going in the wrong direction.
Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2
#174Earlier 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…
I’ve also had a good experience using SwiftUI with hosting confia for my cells. I am now at a point where I mostly use SwiftUI with just the occasional fallback to programmatic UIKit for the bits that are not quite there yet.
Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2
#175Honest 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…
It's second system syndrome combined with the fact that Objective C and the NeXT underpinnings were put together by a team of truly the greatest minds of a generation.
Swift was put together by some great minds, and some minds, Apple still attracts talent, but in far lower density. This isn't even a jab, just from the fact that they are far larger and the talent pool is smaller with far more competition.
What percentage of genius level developers want to work for a company where they can't talk about their work and generally get zero public credit?
Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Swift’s goals are great, I like the syntax, but the language implementation seems to just special case everything rather than having coherent language design. This could not be furthest for the truth. The entire process of proposing a new language feature to getting it implemented and shipped is out in the open for everyone to participate/see. https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution
What’s that got to do with coherent language design? Just because it’s somewhat open doesn’t mean it has consistent design. Then by all accounts Apple just forced through language changes needed for SwiftUI.
I agree that that is the one counter example for the above. Apple forcing the closure syntax to better cater to SwiftUI left a sour taste in the mouths of an entire community.
Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2
#177Earlier 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.…
I have a good bug right now. My wife bought a Macbook Air. I use High DPI and she does not. It is impossible to switch between users in this situation, one of the core functionalities of the computer is just broken. Makes me wonder if anyone at Apple uses these computers..
No one tests multi-user functionality, afaict.
Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2
#178Honest 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…
As someone frequently flipping between Swift and Kotlin, while I don’t necessarily feel like Swift is massively superior, I often find myself thinking “why is this so quirky and pedantic” when writing Kotlin. For example, I really really wish Kotlin would adopt Swift style if let/guard let statements. Kotlin smart casting doesn’t work just often enough to not be able to consistently rely on it and the foo?.let { } sy…
Ha, I switch between the two as well, but I feel the opposite. Kotlin is much more intuitive for me, and Swift is more clunky. I do miss guard lets in Kotlin, but that’s about it.
Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a good bug right now. My wife bought a Macbook Air. I use High DPI and she does not. It is impossible to switch between users in this situation, one of the core functionalities of the computer is just broken. Makes me wonder if anyone at Apple uses these computers..
No one tests multi-user functionality, afaict.
Has Apple been testing anything in the last many years?
Re: What’s new in Swift 6.2
#180It sure feels like Swift governance is broken.
They're just shoveling stuff in to the language.
Individually, most items aren't so bad, but collectively they've got a mess and it's getting bigger fast.
None of the decision-makers seem to have the sense or incentive to say "no" to anything.
It's sad, because the language had such promise and there are some really nice things in there.
Well, at least it's relatively easy to avoid or ignore.