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Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

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Re: Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

#3

Post by coralreef »

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?

This discussion seems relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8887545

I took his course a few years ago when I got started programming, it was great.

Re: Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

#4

Post by bvrlt »

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?

Small parts of Genius Scan are written in Swift. It's working fine.

In theory it's nice to work with, as it forces you to think everything more carefully and consider all error/nullable cases. In practice, integration with XCode is still full of bugs, code completion is crashing all the time, Swift classes show up as missing symbols in Objective-C (but the project compiles fine)... So, it's a bit painful and it slows down the development process.

We will keep it to very small and well-defined pieces of code for now. It's good to learn about it, but it's not productive.

Re: Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

#5

Post by ikura »

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 have already used it for new projects and was glad I did. Yes there are some teething issues, but the small amount of pain is manageable and the productivity improvements are very worthwhile. I start all new projects with Swift now whenever appopriate.

Re: Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift

#8

Post by austinz »

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've been using Swift for personal projects. The company at which I work (it's a large social network that recruiters love) has a couple of small teams which have released or are working on apps written entirely in Swift. So it's definitely usable.

Good reasons to use Swift might include the following:

- You think you can make good use of the features Swift offers (generics, sum types, optionals, namespaces, typed containers) and are willing to not just write Objective-C code with a different syntax.

- You are willing to take a short-term productivity hit to learn a language which will probably become the crux of Apple's developer tools in the future.

- Your project isn't going to rely heavily on the dynamic features Objective-C offers (e.g. method swizzling, adding or replacing classes and methods at runtime).

Things that are troublesome with Swift include the following:

- Swift's interoperability with Objective-C and Cocoa Touch is still touch-and-go in a lot of places. It's been getting better, but unless you understand how both Cocoa Touch and Swift work, you will just have to take on faith things like IBOutlets being implicitly unwrapped optionals.

- Xcode's stability when it comes to working with Swift projects leaves much to be desired. The level of instability also seems to vary; I've worked on files that crashed SourceKit over and over and files that caused the IDE no trouble at all.

- I wouldn't call Swift alpha-quality, but there are still compiler and runtime bugs that need to be addressed.

(BTW I really wish HN supported proper lists in comments. Doing the two-space indent just makes everything run off the screen.)

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