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Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
201–210 of 332 posts
Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
#202As someone who first began using Swift in 2021, after almost 10 years in C#/.NET land, I was already a bit grumpy at how complex C# was, (C# was 21 years at that point), but then coming to Swift, I couldn't believe how complex Swift was compared to C# - Swift was released in 2014, so would've been 8 years old in 2022. How is a language less than half the age of C# MORE complex than C#? And this was me trying to use S…
So did you go back to and keep using C#/NET?
Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture. What language would you have suggested for that mission and that era? Self or Smalltalk and give up on performance on 25-MHz-class processors? C or Pascal and give up an excellent object system with dynamic dispatch?
C.
C's a great language in 1985, and a great starting point. But development of UI software is one of those areas where object oriented software really shines. What if we could get all the advantages of C as a procedural language, but graft on top an extremely lightweight object system with a spec of < 20 pages to take advantage of these new 1980s-era developments in software engineering, while keeping 100% of the maturity and performance of the C ecosystem? We could call it Objective-C.
Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some refer to the “Tim Cook doctrine” as a reason for Swift’s existence. It’s not meant to be good, just to fulfill the purpose of controlling that part of their products, so they don’t have to rely on someone else’s tooling.
I definitely agree with the first point - it's not meant to be the best. On the second part, I think the big thing was that they needed something that would interop with Objective-C well and that's not something that any language was going to do if Apple didn't make it. Swift gave Apple something that software engineers would like a ton more than Objective-C. I think it's also important to remember that in 2010/2014…
To add to this, whatever was to become Obj-C's successor needed to be just as or more well-suited for UI programming with AppKit/UIKit as Obj-C was. That alone narrows the list of candidates a lot.
Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
What language do you recommend?
The best tool for the job is the one you know and love.
It depends. Many languages are a poor fit for certain use cases, and some are bad at everything beyond a very specific niche. Some are rather unpleasant to write any kind of substantial UI with.
Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
#206As someone who first began using Swift in 2021, after almost 10 years in C#/.NET land, I was already a bit grumpy at how complex C# was, (C# was 21 years at that point), but then coming to Swift, I couldn't believe how complex Swift was compared to C# - Swift was released in 2014, so would've been 8 years old in 2022. How is a language less than half the age of C# MORE complex than C#? And this was me trying to use S…
I started using it around 2018. After being reasonably conversant in Objective-C, I fully adopted Swift for a new iOS app and thought it was a big improvement. But there's a lot of hokey, amateurish stuff in there... with more added all the time. Let's start with the arbitrary "structs are passed by value, classes by reference." And along with that: "Prefer structs over classes." But then: "Have one source of truth."…
Nowhere does it say structs provide “one source of truth”. It says the opposite actually- that classes are to be used when unique instances are required. All classes have a unique ID, which is simply it’s virtual memory address. Structs by contrast get memcpy’d left and right and have no uniqueness.
You can also look at the source code for the language if any it’s confusing. It’s very readable.
Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
#207Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
#208As someone who first began using Swift in 2021, after almost 10 years in C#/.NET land, I was already a bit grumpy at how complex C# was, (C# was 21 years at that point), but then coming to Swift, I couldn't believe how complex Swift was compared to C# - Swift was released in 2014, so would've been 8 years old in 2022. How is a language less than half the age of C# MORE complex than C#? And this was me trying to use S…
I started using it around 2018. After being reasonably conversant in Objective-C, I fully adopted Swift for a new iOS app and thought it was a big improvement. But there's a lot of hokey, amateurish stuff in there... with more added all the time. Let's start with the arbitrary "structs are passed by value, classes by reference." And along with that: "Prefer structs over classes." But then: "Have one source of truth."…
Prefer structs over classes != only use structs.
There are plenty of valid reasons to use classes in Swift. For example if you want to have shared state you will need to use a class so that each client has the same reference instead of a copy.
Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
#209Why did Ladybird even attempt this with Swift, but (I presume) not with Rust? If they're going to go to the trouble of adding another language, does Rust not have a better history of C++ interop? Not to mention, Swift's GC doesn't seem great for the browser's performance.
Here's Andreas Kling's general thoughts on Rust:
- Excellent for short-lived programs that transform input A to output B
- Clunky for long-lived programs that maintain large complex object graphs
- Really impressive ecosystem
- Toxic community
Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It’s truly remarkable they made something with such staying power What has had the staying power is the API because that API is for an operating system that has had that staying power. As you hint, the macOS of today is simply the evolution of NeXTSTEP (released in 1989). And iOS is just a light version of it. But 1989 is not all that remarkable. The Linux API (POSIX) was introduced in 1988 but started in 1984 and b…
In some ways ObjC’s and the NEXTSTEP API’s staying power is more impressive because they survived the failure of their relatively small patron organization. POSIX and C++ were developed at and supported by tech titans - the 1970s and 1980s equivalents of FAANG. Meanwhile back at the turn of the century we had all witnessed the demise of NeXT and many of us were anticipating the demise of Apple, and there was no parti…
Good take. Even back in the 1990s, OpenStep was thought to be the best way to develop a Windows app. But NeXT charged per-seat licenses, so it didn't get much use outside of Wall Street or other places where Jobs would personally show up. And of course something like iPhone is easier when they already had a UI framework and an IDE and etc.