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Swift Regrets

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Re: Swift Regrets

#91

Post by Someone »

iainmerrick wrote: post #67
saagarjha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile Objective-C is slow, unsafe by default, with super ugly syntax only a mother could love. More than half of Apple's CVE/iOS vulnerabilities lately have been from parts of the OS that still use ObjC, Objective-C is quite fast–in many cases faster than Swift–and as (memory) safe as Swift for the most part. Most of Apple's CVEs come from code written in C or C++, not Objective-C.

Right! If it’s so slow, how did the original iPhone work so slickly, when all the apps and most of the frameworks were written in Objective-C?

For the same reason python is fast for machine learning: because the performant parts were written in C.

Ignoring slick animations (which were written in C, if not in hand-tuned assembly) typical UIs of apps on the original iPhone could have run (a bit slowly and in monochrome) on an original Mac, that is in 128kB RAM on a 8MHz CPU.

Re: Swift Regrets

#92

Post by pianoben »

protomyth wrote: post #10

I guess I was in the minority who loved Objective-C and it's selector syntax. I think my main objection to Swift is that it seems to be written by people who hate Objective-C and made the calling syntax much more complicated. I dearly wish a more mature F-Script had been the next Apple language. A lot of the other problems is Apple not providing good documentation and making sure sample programs continue to compile.…

I'm with you.

Despite the verbosity of the NS/Cocoa/etc APIs, Objective-C is a small, flexible, and unambiguous language. It performs very well at runtime, and is amazingly quick to compile. With version 2.0 and ARC, it became productive in addition to everything else.

I get it, it was long in the tooth, and the C legacy was both a blessing and a heavy weight holding the language back, but we lost a lot of the simplicity in the move to Swift.

Re: Swift Regrets

#93

Post by zionic »

saagarjha wrote: post #62
zionic wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think my main objection to Swift is that it seems to be written by people who hate Objective-C I mean that's the vast majority of people >and made the calling syntax much more complicated. How is this true? Swift is very straightforward, and similar to other languages Meanwhile Objective-C is slow, unsafe by default, with super ugly syntax only a mother could love. More than half of Apple's CVE/iOS vulnerabilitie…

> Meanwhile Objective-C is slow, unsafe by default, with super ugly syntax only a mother could love. More than half of Apple's CVE/iOS vulnerabilities lately have been from parts of the OS that still use ObjC, Objective-C is quite fast–in many cases faster than Swift–and as (memory) safe as Swift for the most part. Most of Apple's CVEs come from code written in C or C++, not Objective-C.

This shouldn’t be true, ObjC’s only innate advantage is compile time, because the compiler is simply doing less and is capable of producing far worse (unsafe) code.

At runtime Swift can utilize static dispatch, where objective C is mostly dynamic. Good swift code should generally be faster.

Re: Swift Regrets

#94

Post by zionic »

iainmerrick wrote: post #67
saagarjha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile Objective-C is slow, unsafe by default, with super ugly syntax only a mother could love. More than half of Apple's CVE/iOS vulnerabilities lately have been from parts of the OS that still use ObjC, Objective-C is quite fast–in many cases faster than Swift–and as (memory) safe as Swift for the most part. Most of Apple's CVEs come from code written in C or C++, not Objective-C.

Right! If it’s so slow, how did the original iPhone work so slickly, when all the apps and most of the frameworks were written in Objective-C?

I think you’re forgetting how barebones iOS1 was. I had to jailbreak to get MMS and copy-paste.

Re: Swift Regrets

#95

Post by ajconway »

iainmerrick wrote: post #67
saagarjha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile Objective-C is slow, unsafe by default, with super ugly syntax only a mother could love. More than half of Apple's CVE/iOS vulnerabilities lately have been from parts of the OS that still use ObjC, Objective-C is quite fast–in many cases faster than Swift–and as (memory) safe as Swift for the most part. Most of Apple's CVEs come from code written in C or C++, not Objective-C.

Right! If it’s so slow, how did the original iPhone work so slickly, when all the apps and most of the frameworks were written in Objective-C?

If you look at the original review videos (or even the keynote), you may notice that the first iPhone lags quite a bit. Of course, it's not Objective-C that causes it, but rather the limited hardware of the time.

Re: Swift Regrets

#96

Post by ajconway »

Someone wrote: post #91
iainmerrick wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right! If it’s so slow, how did the original iPhone work so slickly, when all the apps and most of the frameworks were written in Objective-C?

For the same reason python is fast for machine learning: because the performant parts were written in C. Ignoring slick animations (which were written in C, if not in hand-tuned assembly) typical UIs of apps on the original iPhone could have run (a bit slowly and in monochrome) on an original Mac, that is in 128kB RAM on a 8MHz CPU.

Animations were slick (compared to other mobile platforms) because they were hardware accelerated.

Re: Swift Regrets

#97

Post by zionic »

iainmerrick wrote: post #68
jbluepolarbear wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s not. If you have multiple parameters Obj-C is much longer and ugly.

Where are you getting this from? Swift’s mandatory named parameters come from Objective-C. For the most part only the bracket placement is different.

Mandatory names parameters?

You have been able to provide anonymous arguments since I first started playing with Swift in 2.0. The function just has to define it that way.

Re: Swift Regrets

#98

Post by apple4ever »

protomyth wrote: post #10

I guess I was in the minority who loved Objective-C and it's selector syntax. I think my main objection to Swift is that it seems to be written by people who hate Objective-C and made the calling syntax much more complicated. I dearly wish a more mature F-Script had been the next Apple language. A lot of the other problems is Apple not providing good documentation and making sure sample programs continue to compile.…

I was there with you too. Objective-C may have been verbose, but it was readable and easily modifiable.

It definitely seemed like the people who wrote Swift hated Objective-C. The "let", "func", etc syntax is ugly and unnecessary, along with the question marks.

I know I'm swimming against the tide, but I'll be writing Objective-C for as long as I can.

Re: Swift Regrets

#99

Post by Aaargh20318 »

iainmerrick wrote: post #67
saagarjha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile Objective-C is slow, unsafe by default, with super ugly syntax only a mother could love. More than half of Apple's CVE/iOS vulnerabilities lately have been from parts of the OS that still use ObjC, Objective-C is quite fast–in many cases faster than Swift–and as (memory) safe as Swift for the most part. Most of Apple's CVEs come from code written in C or C++, not Objective-C.

Right! If it’s so slow, how did the original iPhone work so slickly, when all the apps and most of the frameworks were written in Objective-C?

The original iPhone was very slick mainly because everything else on the market at that time was so terrible.

Re: Swift Regrets

#100

Post by sharp11 »

Unlike many commenters here, I came to praise Swift. Of course there will be regrets -- nothing's perfect -- but on the whole I think the designers (and community) did an amazing job with Swift. I say that after having written multiple apps in Objective C -- I would never consider going back.

Optionals and null safety, first class enums, first class functions are just lovely in swift, all in a language that is super readable when well-written.

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