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Swift's Evolution

carpeaqua.com

11–20 of 105 posts

Re: Swift's Evolution

#11
post #10

Will Kotlin Native be able to compete with Swift on iOS? The syntax is very similar and it would make for a nice cross platform PL. I was holding off on Swift to see where it was going, but I'd like to add iOS to my dev targets. Objective-C was too verbose for me years ago, but I've heard it has changed a bunch.

At some point it looks like Dart and Flutter might be an option as well. Though with emulated widgets vs native.

Re: Swift's Evolution

#12

And I thought 2017 is the year when I start a new app in swift... guess will be sticking to objc and react native depending on what makes sense where.

Just give it a try. While Swift is not perfect, it really is great for macOS/iOS development and continuously getting better. I'd never go back to ObjC.

Re: Swift's Evolution

#13
post #2

I use Swift daily in a mixed application of both languages. I worked with ObjC since back in the NeXT days and I used to like the language but today nothing could ever drive me back. Xcode on the other hand is nightmare I despise daily but that's a different issue. The sooner ObjC goes away the better.

I'm the exact opposite. I have been forcing myself to use Swift daily to rewrite utilities and help with an iOS app. I hate their take on the Smalltalk-style selector (the unnecessary parentheses is a pain) and other parts of the language. I'll use it, but it is much like Transact-SQL or Perl was for me (become an expert but not really like the language or programming in it).

Re: Swift's Evolution

#14

The biggest problem Swift has is breaking changes from a version to another. Took me about 10 days to manually convert a Swift 2.5 project to Swift 3 to find out that Swift 4 will also introduce at least two breaking changes. I'm all for progress and modern ideas in a programming language, just don't break my old code!

They were pretty clear about this from the beginning... Sometimes you need to break a few things here and there to make it a more pleasant language for the decades to come.

Re: Swift's Evolution

#15
This post hits it right on ... the renaming thing and the removal of traditional for loops ... I'm just bewildered by it. When I saw it, my reaction was ... WHY??? The incompatibilities between swift 2 and swift 3 made me thankful I did not invest the language prior to 3. While I stepped into it at this point, and think the language has a lot of potential (not changing the damn language .. I mean having a large eco system of useful libraries around it). Apple still has an opportunity if they don't screw it up further.

Re: Swift's Evolution

#16
I'm actually pretty happy swift moves the server side story forward, because i'm convinced the "next big language" will have to run on mobile and server. Actually, i think they don't go fast enough, especially regarding concurrency ( which on the server goes beyond just providing async await, as lattner said they were aiming at something closer to the actor model).

I don't think the "maybe objc is still relevant for new project" trend we've been seeing the last few months on HN is going anywhere. I'm currently in the process of converting a large codebase from objc to swift, and there is absolutely no doubt that the language is WAY better, and brings a lot of safety enhancements as well.

The only big remaining pain point now is clearly in the tooling, but now that they're stabilized the language a bit more, it's probably going to get better fast.

Re: Swift's Evolution

#17

This post hits it right on ... the renaming thing and the removal of traditional for loops ... I'm just bewildered by it. When I saw it, my reaction was ... WHY??? The incompatibilities between swift 2 and swift 3 made me thankful I did not invest the language prior to 3. While I stepped into it at this point, and think the language has a lot of potential (not changing the damn language .. I mean having a large eco s…

> the removal of traditional for loops […] When I saw it, my reaction was ... WHY???

For all of these reasons, at least: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/proposa...

Re: Swift's Evolution

#19

This post hits it right on ... the renaming thing and the removal of traditional for loops ... I'm just bewildered by it. When I saw it, my reaction was ... WHY??? The incompatibilities between swift 2 and swift 3 made me thankful I did not invest the language prior to 3. While I stepped into it at this point, and think the language has a lot of potential (not changing the damn language .. I mean having a large eco s…

I like the renaming, even though I don't like the way they went about it (the migration was, and continues to be a huge headache). I also like that they removed traditional for loops — what would be your reason for keeping them?

Re: Swift's Evolution

#20

This post hits it right on ... the renaming thing and the removal of traditional for loops ... I'm just bewildered by it. When I saw it, my reaction was ... WHY??? The incompatibilities between swift 2 and swift 3 made me thankful I did not invest the language prior to 3. While I stepped into it at this point, and think the language has a lot of potential (not changing the damn language .. I mean having a large eco s…

> the removal of traditional for loops […] When I saw it, my reaction was ... WHY??? For all of these reasons, at least: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/proposa...

Thanks for sharing that link. I found it quite an interesting read. (I much prefer Swift to ObjC after a conversion of about 10k lines in an iOS app).

C style for loops come pretty early in most programming tutorials, but I wonder how much non-C programming does actually use them nowadays (from the Community Responses, it seems not much Swift courtesy of other options). Usually, a C style for would be to loop over an array, and a safer way to do that probably could have stopped countless vulnerabilities & bugs occurring over the years.

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