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Thank you. It's weird---Swift is a beautiful language as a language, but all these ecosystem things make it really really hard to use. (The worst IMO is packag

Thank you. It's weird---Swift is a beautiful language as a language, but all these ecosystem things make it really really hard to use. (The worst IMO is package management---like, some libraries require cocoapods, and some work with swift package manager, but swift package manager for swift 3 and 4 are totally different, and how does Xcode vs command line fit into all of this and libraries vs frameworks and COME ON IT SHOULDN'T BE THIS HARD!)

skohan 8y ago
As someone who wants to see Swift succeed as a main-stream language I could not agree with you more. I can forgive the API differences between SPM for swift 3 and 4, after all the ecosystem is evolving and I'm a fan of iterating interfaces early rather than having to keep early mistakes in the spec _forever_ for the sake of backward compatibility. But the Package Manager is still pretty far from being nice to use. In several of my projects which are using it, I also have a custom CLI implemented to streamline some of the worst pain points. As far as dependency management, I think a huge issue is the lack of proper support for Swift Package Manager for iOS projects. Apple's 1st class solution for including software modules in iOS projects is "Just drag the framework into your XCode project", which is of course an absurd solution for any serious workflow. Cocoapods (and to a lesser extent Carthage) have stepped in to fill the gap as 3rd party solutions, but there's still no real way to use Swift Package Manager to manage the dependancies for an iOS project. As a result a lot of libraries don't even bother with SPM support since the largest portion of their target audience will never use it. And thus adoption is slow, so there's not a large user-base demanding improvements.