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Could Swift be the reason why Apple software post 2010ish has been so buggy? I'm just trying to put 2 and 2 together here because Swift was released with iOS7 c

Could Swift be the reason why Apple software post 2010ish has been so buggy? I'm just trying to put 2 and 2 together here because Swift was released with iOS7 circa 2010.

mcphage 9y ago
I’m not sure how much Apple uses it internally, to be honest.
JimDabell 9y ago
No, the Swift project was started in 2010, it was only released in 2014, and it was new to most of Apple at that time. Apple didn't start shipping things built with Swift until 2015, and even then it was only a tiny proportion of their software. Even today, the vast majority of their software is Objective-C, because Apple aren't just going to rewrite everything in Swift just because.
- checker659 9y ago
  I'm sorry, I mentioned the wrong date. iOS 7 and Swift were both released in 2014 (and not 2010).
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
I suspect it is because they transitioned away from 32 bit. Maybe they had to rewrite some older, debugged, 32bit libraries.
- checker659 9y ago
  Didn't that happen circa osx 10.6? Mid 2009? Also, snow leopard was a great stable release.
  - newscracker 9y ago
    That was only for OS X/macOS. The transition for iOS started much later, with iOS 11 being 64-bit only for apps.
aphextron 9y ago
>Could Swift be the reason why Apple software post 2010ish has been so buggy? I'm just trying to put 2 and 2 together here because Swift was released with iOS7 circa 2010. That makes a lot of sense to me. Swift is a great language, but it did a lot to turn iOS development into more like Javascript development. I fear that with the addition of garbage collection rather than reference counting, programmers have become lazy and forgotten they are still working within the constraints of what’s essentially an embedded device. In the Objective-C days, devs were more exposed to that side of things on a regular basis, and I think that experience deeply affects the way one thinks about resource usage and optimization. I have no doubt that a bulk of Apple’s application teams writing Swift today are former web devs, not systems or embedded developers as was the case when mobile software first came about from ‘07-‘12ish
- JimDabell 9y ago
  > Swift is a great language, but it did a lot to turn iOS development into more like Javascript development. I fear that with the addition of garbage collection rather than reference counting, programmers have become lazy and forgotten they are still working within the constraints of what’s essentially an embedded device. In the Objective-C days, devs were more exposed to that side of things on a regular basis Swift is nothing like JavaScript at all. It's not garbage-collected, it's reference counted with ARC – exactly like modern Objective-C.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Reference counting is a GC algorithm.
    - ninkendo 9y ago
      They’re not even close to the same thing though. ARC gives deterministic performance rather than GC’s effectively random pauses. Compare a UI framework that uses garbage collection on the hot path to one that uses ARC, it’s night and day when it comes to smooth animations and responsiveness.
deepaksurti 9y ago
I guess part of it also has to be the fact that Scott Forstall was probably a better VP of iOS software than the one who replaced him, looking at the downgrade in quality. The one right at the top of the pyramid does make a difference.
- newscracker 9y ago
  I believe firing Scott Forstall was not a good move for the company's future. Whatever the reason cited was (Apple Maps) at that time, that hasn't improved after all these years. I'm not talking about the U.S. and a few other countries, where there have been big improvements — in many other countries in the world, Apple Maps is useless even in major cities.

Could Swift be the reason why Apple software post 2010ish has been so buggy? I'm just trying to put 2 and 2 together here because Swift was released with iOS7 circa 2010.

mcphage 9y ago

I’m not sure how much Apple uses it internally, to be honest.

JimDabell 9y ago

No, the Swift project was started in 2010, it was only released in 2014, and it was new to most of Apple at that time. Apple didn't start shipping things built with Swift until 2015, and even then it was only a tiny proportion of their software. Even today, the vast majority of their software is Objective-C, because Apple aren't just going to rewrite everything in Swift just because.

checker659 9y ago
I'm sorry, I mentioned the wrong date. iOS 7 and Swift were both released in 2014 (and not 2010).

JustSomeNobody 9y ago

I suspect it is because they transitioned away from 32 bit. Maybe they had to rewrite some older, debugged, 32bit libraries.

checker659 9y ago
Didn't that happen circa osx 10.6? Mid 2009? Also, snow leopard was a great stable release.
- newscracker 9y ago
  That was only for OS X/macOS. The transition for iOS started much later, with iOS 11 being 64-bit only for apps.

aphextron 9y ago

>Could Swift be the reason why Apple software post 2010ish has been so buggy? I'm just trying to put 2 and 2 together here because Swift was released with iOS7 circa 2010. That makes a lot of sense to me. Swift is a great language, but it did a lot to turn iOS development into more like Javascript development. I fear that with the addition of garbage collection rather than reference counting, programmers have become lazy and forgotten they are still working within the constraints of what’s essentially an embedded device. In the Objective-C days, devs were more exposed to that side of things on a regular basis, and I think that experience deeply affects the way one thinks about resource usage and optimization. I have no doubt that a bulk of Apple’s application teams writing Swift today are former web devs, not systems or embedded developers as was the case when mobile software first came about from ‘07-‘12ish

JimDabell 9y ago
> Swift is a great language, but it did a lot to turn iOS development into more like Javascript development. I fear that with the addition of garbage collection rather than reference counting, programmers have become lazy and forgotten they are still working within the constraints of what’s essentially an embedded device. In the Objective-C days, devs were more exposed to that side of things on a regular basis Swift is nothing like JavaScript at all. It's not garbage-collected, it's reference counted with ARC – exactly like modern Objective-C.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Reference counting is a GC algorithm.
  - ninkendo 9y ago
    They’re not even close to the same thing though. ARC gives deterministic performance rather than GC’s effectively random pauses. Compare a UI framework that uses garbage collection on the hot path to one that uses ARC, it’s night and day when it comes to smooth animations and responsiveness.

deepaksurti 9y ago

I guess part of it also has to be the fact that Scott Forstall was probably a better VP of iOS software than the one who replaced him, looking at the downgrade in quality. The one right at the top of the pyramid does make a difference.

newscracker 9y ago
I believe firing Scott Forstall was not a good move for the company's future. Whatever the reason cited was (Apple Maps) at that time, that hasn't improved after all these years. I'm not talking about the U.S. and a few other countries, where there have been big improvements — in many other countries in the world, Apple Maps is useless even in major cities.