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30k lines of SwiftUI in production later

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Re: 30k lines of SwiftUI in production later

#21

Post by SpaghettiX »

> It took a few hours to fall in love with SwiftUI.

> It was in development for 12 months. It would have been less if SwiftUI just gave.

> At the end, we didn’t drop it for a couple of reasons. We were too deep into the process. Being a bootstrapped operation that was already severely behind schedule, we couldn’t afford to restart.

This may be useful to someone trying to create something:

In terms of software engineering, you took "a few hours to fall in love with SwiftUI." There could've been more evaluation done: reviewing existing complaints of SwiftUI, implementing the most challenging parts of your UI as a sanity check, or trying it in a small side project, hiring a developer that has used it before, etc. Also, why count lines of code, as opposed to describing features and challenging technical details. Lines of code doesn't signal anything (e.g. effort, quality, time spent, features, is it code generated?, etc.). Every line is an extra source of bugs.

In terms of product development, it took 1 year to ship the product, so after all that, you don't know if you have customers. That's fine for a side project, but this is a "bootstrapped operation behind schedule".

Alternative: I hear Flutter is quite productive. If you one to fall in love with technology, you'll like Flutter.

Re: 30k lines of SwiftUI in production later

#22

Post by hombre_fatal »

dmitriid wrote: post #2

What amazes me is that scrolling has never really been an issue in any native app? And yet here we are in 2023, with a native framework built for modern devices (where scrolling is the main interaction) that... inherits the worst behaviors of web of all things?

Scrolling has never been trivial. It’s very hard to build abstractions around it. For example UITableView required quite a lot of boilerplate and manual edge case code. Android’s abstractions have very similar issues.

So no, it’s never been a solved problem just like UI abstractions have never been a solved problem, so solved that there’s nothing to improve or explore.

Re: 30k lines of SwiftUI in production later

#23

Post by pictur »

Is it possible to write an application of this scale with flutter without (or very little) infecting swift? probably can be written, but I would like to hear comments about what can be experienced in terms of performance and development.

Re: 30k lines of SwiftUI in production later

#24

Post by jb1991 »

I love declarative UIs and still long for the days I was writing early front-end React apps nearly a decade ago and how amazing it felt for a UI to behave that way. Years later, today I work primarily in iOS and would love to do this on that platform, but every time I read an article like this, my head hurts. Workarounds for workarounds, a great many special cases that are quite unexpected. I've gotten very fluent with UIKit and doing all sorts of custom controls and animations, and to abandon that comfort and productivity for another...year?... of a frustrating learning curve does not entice me to give it a try.

But I love the declarative paradigm so much; if only I could easily bring in my toolset of choice, whether it is Elm, Redux, etc, with all the power that native controls on iOS have, that would be awesome. SwiftUI is the only valid answer, but wow, I cannot get motivated to go down that rabbit hole.

Re: 30k lines of SwiftUI in production later

#26

Post by mrtksn »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #19
mrtksn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, can you give some details on what's wrong for you? Like what is the better way to do it?

Xcode doesnt even support features like format on save nor does it have powerful enough api to support a mod ecosystem to fill in its gaps. It has all sorts of bugs and weird fail cases. Honestly you should just search the internet for testimonials because anyone who uses Xcode can create a list of issues rather than rehash them all here in response.

I grew to dislike mods and ever growing features. Lately I'm experimenting with Swift Playgrounds and I start liking it very much precisely because lacks a lot of features but its still capable do a lot.

So many features and linters and tools end up building a huge cognitive overhead, which is the primary reason I haven't been touching JS since a few years. The JS world piled up so me sh*t in order to make the working with JS something that is not, that I found myself not having energy and time to do something other that setting up tools and frameworks.

What I want is to be able to start coding like start writing an article in a Word document and Swift Playgrounds is getting there. XCode was good too but wasn't anything special, Swift Playgrounds is amazing.

I'm especially excited for WASM, so maybe I can just write everything in Swift eventually.

Re: 30k lines of SwiftUI in production later

#30

Post by mrtksn »

jalino23 wrote: post #15
mrtksn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with Xcode? Is it the usual "iPhone is preparing for development" type of annoyances? Is it the bugs that sometimes prevent you from compiling? Or is it something more fundamental like even when everything works fine you don't like it?

its the I'm used to vim and transitioned to helix and kinda like everything in terminal. it feels heavy

Have you tried Swift Playgrounds? All the heaviness of an IDE goes away, it feels light as a toy but can do all the basics very well. It has some annoyances but the "opened a file and start writing my code, didn't bother with anything else" vibe is there.
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