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Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

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Re: Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

#11

Post by melling »

tkubacki wrote: post #2

I heard from devs Swift 1.0 is still alpha quality (tools) and Apple shouldn't release it. Would you use it for new project?

I think slow compile times and the stability of Xcode are the two biggest complaints. It should only be a matter of months before these issues are addressed. Now is probably a great time to start learning. Btw, I've collected over 500 Swift urls over the past several months. My hope is that iOS developers will soon have everything they need to make a quick migration to the new language.

http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html

Re: Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

#12

Post by arjie »

tkubacki wrote: post #2

I heard from devs Swift 1.0 is still alpha quality (tools) and Apple shouldn't release it. Would you use it for new project?

I used it this last week. SourceKit would crash all the time. Xcode would crash occasionally. There'd be spurious warnings. Very poor quality warnings. Stuff like "missing argument" and "extra argument" when the class is abstract.

And I'm not sure about this, but the documentation is also off in a lot of places. Essentially anywhere there is a 'setX' is meaningless because that function won't actually exist even if the (Swift) page for it claims it does because in most case you just access the variable.

Re: Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

#13

Post by alex_g »

tkubacki wrote: post #2

I heard from devs Swift 1.0 is still alpha quality (tools) and Apple shouldn't release it. Would you use it for new project?

I attended a Swift workshop (hosted by Apple) on my campus today. After the workshop, I asked one of the Apple engineers what he recommended in terms of developing iOS apps. He told me that he hadn't even seen what Swift looked like until today, that Apple employees are banned from using it (and that they actually have code checkers to make sure), and that he wouldn't learn it solely w/o Obj-C until a few years from now. He noted that Apple is still changing it a lot, as it's young, so the structure of the language could change dramatically between now and next year.

He thought it was good idea when I suggested learning Obj-C and then using Swift to cut down on dev time, b/c it is quicker for many things.

Re: Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

#15

Post by therealayn »

tkubacki wrote: post #2

I heard from devs Swift 1.0 is still alpha quality (tools) and Apple shouldn't release it. Would you use it for new project?

We have been using Swift for a complex production app since August, there are a few issues like SourceKit crashing very often and some tools like the memory report inside Xcode doesn't seem to work properly (Instruments works fine though). Other than that Swift has been solid and you should definitely use it for new projects.

Re: Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

#17

Post by cageface »

alex_g wrote: post #13
tkubacki wrote: post #2

I heard from devs Swift 1.0 is still alpha quality (tools) and Apple shouldn't release it. Would you use it for new project?

I attended a Swift workshop (hosted by Apple) on my campus today. After the workshop, I asked one of the Apple engineers what he recommended in terms of developing iOS apps. He told me that he hadn't even seen what Swift looked like until today, that Apple employees are banned from using it (and that they actually have code checkers to make sure), and that he wouldn't learn it solely w/o Obj-C until a few years from…

I think a lot of the blame for the backlash in the iOS community over Swift should be laid squarely at Apple's feet. At WWDC they pitched it as production-ready but the truth is that even today it is seriously unfinished. It doesn't even support incremental compilation and the tooling is still very fragile. I'd strongly recommend anybody new to iOS to start with ObjC for now. You need to at least be able to read ObjC to understand the APIs and all of the sample code out there and it's still overall a more productive environment.

I don't think any of Swift's current problems are unfixable but I'd give it another year or so at least to mature.

Re: Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

#19

Post by lpsz »

tkubacki wrote: post #2

I heard from devs Swift 1.0 is still alpha quality (tools) and Apple shouldn't release it. Would you use it for new project?

Using Swift for sometime here. The language itself is great and I find myself generally more productive.

The annoyances are not with the language, but with the tooling. Slow auto-complete and lack of incremental compilation are my wishes for Apple to fix soon.

Re: Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

#20

Post by vbezhenar »

tkubacki wrote: post #2

I heard from devs Swift 1.0 is still alpha quality (tools) and Apple shouldn't release it. Would you use it for new project?

I wrote a custom keyboard using Swift. XCode stability was mostly OK. SourceKit crashed sometimes (disabling syntax highlight and autocomplete), but it didn't cause much headache.

The thing that bothered me most was that iOS app wrote with Swift was packaged with 8 MB runtime libraries, so it was like 100 kB of my code and 8 MB of swift runtime libraries which I didn't like at all.

I tried to learn how to write an OS X application with Swift and for some reason it became a nightmare, SourceKit keeps crashing and it wasn't possible to work at all. I guess I triggered some bug. I tried to investigate it, but without much success, I think that XCode will send those crash logs to Apple and may be things are already fixed.

Actually I'm not really sure that Swift is the language I want to use. Objective C is good enough. It's good old C which I like. It's very dynamic which I like. Cocoa, Cocoa Touch and other frameworks are made for Objective C, not for Swift. I didn't made a final decision whether I will invest into Swift, but probably (at least until Apple declares Objective C obsolete) I will just use Objective C. It has its problems, but it has its strength too.

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