5 ms·

Read the eulogy when the base libraries are Swift... When swift code that interacts with the base libraries is faster, and when swift code compiles faster. Sw

by fleitz 11y ago

Read the eulogy when the base libraries are Swift... When swift code that interacts with the base libraries is faster, and when swift code compiles faster. Swift so far is a language that over promises and under delivers...

morqon 11y ago
I'm not sure, I've had great fun learning it, and writing it is usually really nice. Sure, there have been pains along the way, but the Apple engineers are doing an amazing job with evolving Swift, intelligently, and very quickly. It is the future, and for many developers I know, it is already part of the present.
- jjtheblunt 11y ago
  How is it not an Apple spin on, say, Scala? Seems similar.
  - cmollis 11y ago
    it(swift) feels that way to me too.. my first impressions were 'scala'.
  - morqon 11y ago
    Hearing one of the core engineers from the LLVM compiler team speak at some length about their aims and approach to Swift, it was cleat that they had reflected long and hard on the approaches of many other languages. This engineer had very informed and nuanced views on the strengths and weaknesses of pretty much any other language you asked about. I'm sure Scala was on this list, also "Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list" — http://www.nondot.org/sabre/ http://www.nondot.org/sabre/
  - mj_langford 11y ago
    Scala and modern C++ had a baby
  - alblue 11y ago
    It's like Scala but without all the unknown performance wrappers and confusing code, and with a highly tuned runtime with a minimal library.
  - chc 11y ago
    How is Scala not a Java spin on F#? It also seems similar. I don't see how any of these comparisons diminish the languages in question.
- fleitz 11y ago
  It's certainly gotten much better with Swift 2.0, it feels like Apple finally tried to build an app with Swift 2.0 and fixed a lot of the stuff that is horribly broken.
saurik 11y ago
Yeah... I'm pretty certain the only code in iOS 9 that is written in Swift is the Calculator app, which was also the first app I remember Apple shipping that actually used their public version of UIKit; until iOS 4, when Apple dogfooding their library finally made UIKit "good", Apple was still using the as-yet-much-better private UIKit they had written for iOS 1 that shared very little... it even had its own UIScrollView called UIScroller and its own UITableView called UITable. While I'm sure the language keeps getting better as people provide feedback, the product isn't going to move past that "omg this is amazing" threshold until Apple dogfoods it, and until then Apple is just using everyone as guinea pigs ;P. FWIW, I think Apple can't ship any base libraries that uses Swift until they finish ABI-compatibility, as they need to be working off the same base Swift runtime as the apps that would run against those libraries. Given that for the last year people have been shipping apps that link against an old-and-incompatible Swift runtime that Xcode bundles into your app, and given how the runtime is "intrusive" (putting stuff into the global Objective-C namespace, for example), it isn't even clear yet (so this may require more time on their end to build out more infrastructure) how they will be able to pull that off without saying "all Swift apps developed before now need to be reshipped or they will stop working on iOS 10".
- artmageddon 11y ago
  Oh goodness. Having written some small apps in both Objective-C and Swift, I'm not even sure which language I should jump back into when I want to pick it up again.
  - kenrikm 11y ago
    Objective C, it has a more clear path at the moment.
    - gress 11y ago
      What does that even mean?
      - kenrikm 11y ago
cageface 11y ago
I've been working on a medium-sized Swift 1.2 app for the last few months and, while it's come a long way from 1.0, I still don't think I'd recommend it for new work yet. Compile times are agonizingly long, even worse than C++.

by fleitz 11y ago

morqon 11y ago

I'm not sure, I've had great fun learning it, and writing it is usually really nice. Sure, there have been pains along the way, but the Apple engineers are doing an amazing job with evolving Swift, intelligently, and very quickly. It is the future, and for many developers I know, it is already part of the present.

jjtheblunt 11y ago
How is it not an Apple spin on, say, Scala? Seems similar.
- cmollis 11y ago
  it(swift) feels that way to me too.. my first impressions were 'scala'.
- morqon 11y ago
  Hearing one of the core engineers from the LLVM compiler team speak at some length about their aims and approach to Swift, it was cleat that they had reflected long and hard on the approaches of many other languages. This engineer had very informed and nuanced views on the strengths and weaknesses of pretty much any other language you asked about. I'm sure Scala was on this list, also "Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list" — http://www.nondot.org/sabre/ http://www.nondot.org/sabre/
- mj_langford 11y ago
  Scala and modern C++ had a baby
- alblue 11y ago
  It's like Scala but without all the unknown performance wrappers and confusing code, and with a highly tuned runtime with a minimal library.
- chc 11y ago
  How is Scala not a Java spin on F#? It also seems similar. I don't see how any of these comparisons diminish the languages in question.
fleitz 11y ago
It's certainly gotten much better with Swift 2.0, it feels like Apple finally tried to build an app with Swift 2.0 and fixed a lot of the stuff that is horribly broken.

saurik 11y ago

Yeah... I'm pretty certain the only code in iOS 9 that is written in Swift is the Calculator app, which was also the first app I remember Apple shipping that actually used their public version of UIKit; until iOS 4, when Apple dogfooding their library finally made UIKit "good", Apple was still using the as-yet-much-better private UIKit they had written for iOS 1 that shared very little... it even had its own UIScrollView called UIScroller and its own UITableView called UITable. While I'm sure the language keeps getting better as people provide feedback, the product isn't going to move past that "omg this is amazing" threshold until Apple dogfoods it, and until then Apple is just using everyone as guinea pigs ;P. FWIW, I think Apple can't ship any base libraries that uses Swift until they finish ABI-compatibility, as they need to be working off the same base Swift runtime as the apps that would run against those libraries. Given that for the last year people have been shipping apps that link against an old-and-incompatible Swift runtime that Xcode bundles into your app, and given how the runtime is "intrusive" (putting stuff into the global Objective-C namespace, for example), it isn't even clear yet (so this may require more time on their end to build out more infrastructure) how they will be able to pull that off without saying "all Swift apps developed before now need to be reshipped or they will stop working on iOS 10".

artmageddon 11y ago
Oh goodness. Having written some small apps in both Objective-C and Swift, I'm not even sure which language I should jump back into when I want to pick it up again.
- kenrikm 11y ago
  Objective C, it has a more clear path at the moment.
  - gress 11y ago
    What does that even mean?
    - kenrikm 11y ago

cageface 11y ago

I've been working on a medium-sized Swift 1.2 app for the last few months and, while it's come a long way from 1.0, I still don't think I'd recommend it for new work yet. Compile times are agonizingly long, even worse than C++.