4 ms·

What's really troubling about these things (GC, ARC, Swift) is the rabid fanboyism. When GC came out, you were complete idiot and a luddite if you didn't embrac

What's really troubling about these things (GC, ARC, Swift) is the rabid fanboyism. When GC came out, you were complete idiot and a luddite if you didn't embrace it I don’t know how to check this, but that isn’t how I remember it at all. There was a brief flurry of interest when Apple added GC, but it never caught on. If it had been popular, Apple would have kept it. Then when ARC arrived, it was genuinely popular, and that’s why it was a lasting success. By automating the exact same retain/release/autorelease protocol that people were already doing by hand, it fit much more neatly into existing Obj-C best practices. I do partly agree with you, that Swift seems to have some problems that haven’t yet been fully resolved, but Apple are still going full steam ahead with it. It feels more like GC, but Apple are treating it like ARC.

saagarjha 9y ago
> Apple are treating it like ARC That's because Swift uses ARC instead of traditional tracing garbage collection.
- iainmerrick 9y ago
  No, that’s completely separate. What I mean is, ignore the specific technologies: Apple is treating Swift like an ideal incremental improvement (like ARC was) whereas it’s really a major change in direction that may or may not prove to be a good idea (like GC was).
mpweiher 9y ago
> [GC not catching on] Well, GC was much harder to adopt, as it wasn't incremental. Either your code was GC or not. All of it. > If it had been popular, Apple would have kept it. Weeelll...I think the bigger problem with GC was that it didn't work; they never could get all the bugs out. Including the performance issues, but more significantly potentially huge leaks. Well, technically that's also performance. I also very much liked the idea of ARC, it looked exactly like what I had lobbied for, and it certainly was much better than GC, if more limited (cycles). And then I tried it and noticed (a) for my idiomatic and highly automated use of MRC, the benefits were between minimal and zero and (b) the drawbacks, particularly the stricter compiler errors, were a major PITA, and unnecessarily so. This becomes noticeable when you write TDD code in an exploratory fashion, because with the errors you have to keep 3 sites in your code up-to-date. That becomes old really fast, but I guess most people don't really do TDD (their loss!), so it's not something that's a major pain point in the community. Incidentally, someone once mailed me that they had switched some code back from ARC to MRC (partly due to what I'd written), and contrary to their expectations and previous assumptions could confirm that the difference was, in fact, negligible. > [Swift like ARC when it's more like GC] That's a good observation. Of course, Swift is a much more dramatic change than even GC ever was, and interestingly the community seems to be much more radical/rabid than Apple. For example, in the community it seems de-rigeur that you must use immutable structs whenever possible, whereas Apple's Swift book gives a few conditions where you might consider structs and then says you should use classes for everything else.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  > Apple's Swift book gives a few conditions where you might consider structs and then says you should use classes for everything else This is an unfortunate edict that the core team is trying to get amended.

saagarjha 9y ago

> Apple are treating it like ARC That's because Swift uses ARC instead of traditional tracing garbage collection.

iainmerrick 9y ago
No, that’s completely separate. What I mean is, ignore the specific technologies: Apple is treating Swift like an ideal incremental improvement (like ARC was) whereas it’s really a major change in direction that may or may not prove to be a good idea (like GC was).

mpweiher 9y ago

> [GC not catching on] Well, GC was much harder to adopt, as it wasn't incremental. Either your code was GC or not. All of it. > If it had been popular, Apple would have kept it. Weeelll...I think the bigger problem with GC was that it didn't work; they never could get all the bugs out. Including the performance issues, but more significantly potentially huge leaks. Well, technically that's also performance. I also very much liked the idea of ARC, it looked exactly like what I had lobbied for, and it certainly was much better than GC, if more limited (cycles). And then I tried it and noticed (a) for my idiomatic and highly automated use of MRC, the benefits were between minimal and zero and (b) the drawbacks, particularly the stricter compiler errors, were a major PITA, and unnecessarily so. This becomes noticeable when you write TDD code in an exploratory fashion, because with the errors you have to keep 3 sites in your code up-to-date. That becomes old really fast, but I guess most people don't really do TDD (their loss!), so it's not something that's a major pain point in the community. Incidentally, someone once mailed me that they had switched some code back from ARC to MRC (partly due to what I'd written), and contrary to their expectations and previous assumptions could confirm that the difference was, in fact, negligible. > [Swift like ARC when it's more like GC] That's a good observation. Of course, Swift is a much more dramatic change than even GC ever was, and interestingly the community seems to be much more radical/rabid than Apple. For example, in the community it seems de-rigeur that you must use immutable structs whenever possible, whereas Apple's Swift book gives a few conditions where you might consider structs and then says you should use classes for everything else.

saagarjha 9y ago
> Apple's Swift book gives a few conditions where you might consider structs and then says you should use classes for everything else This is an unfortunate edict that the core team is trying to get amended.