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I love the momentum around Swift these days, and the LSP looks very interesting.

by sgt 8y ago

robertAngst 8y ago
What momentum? From the Apple team? Sales and stock price are plummeting at Apple. And from another HN thread, developers are finding people/businesses are going back to web instead of App. Out of all the languages, Swift and Obj C are my 'how much longer until they go away?' languages. Is there anything showing growth? EDIT: Obligatory, Apple users can't handle talking about Apple.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  the server side swift panel at apple's conf was supposedly so full there were people standing. people are definitely interested.
- lupinglade 8y ago
  Have you used Swift? It’s not going away, it’s only going to grow.
  - miguelrochefort 8y ago
    Huh? What makes you think that?
  - lmm 8y ago
    Blind assertion is not an argument. What makes Swift a worthwhile/interesting/valuable language outside of the iOS ecosystem? As far as I can see it's yet another language with basically the ML featureset and nothing else; there are certainly worse starting points, but what reasons are there to adopt Swift that don't apply to OCaml or F#, both of which are more established (to say nothing of Rust/Haskell/Scala that actually offer substantive features that other ML-family languages don't have).
    - the_duke 8y ago
      Swift is kind of like Rust with garbage collection and more convenience baked in. It's a pretty nice language with a lot of adoption due to it being nicer and much more modern than ObjectiveC. It's not going anywhere. There are also companies like IBM pushing for Swift on the server. Personally the bad Linux support makes it uninteresting for me right now.
      - lmm 8y ago
        > Swift is kind of like Rust with garbage collection and more convenience baked in. Sure - but again, OCaml or F# have been there for decades.
        rcruzeiro 8y ago
        But to be fair neither OCaml nor F# picked up any significant traction (at least not compared to Swift).
      - zozbot123 8y ago
        AIUI, Swift uses reference counting, not fully-general GC. So, it's really not different from Rust from that POV, other than the fact that Rust can avoid the overhead of atomic refcount updates (or sometimes of reference counting at all) in many cases where Swift requires it. It also seems a bit silly to push for Swift on the backend when excellent and well-supported alternatives exist such as Rust, Go and others.
        lmm 8y ago
        > AIUI, Swift uses reference counting, not fully-general GC. So, it's really not different from Rust from that POV, other than the fact that Rust can avoid the overhead of atomic refcount updates (or sometimes of reference counting at all) in many cases where Swift requires it. No, ARC is a kind of GC. In particular, you have the same pausing behaviour as mark/sweep GC, because freeing any value might result in having to free arbitrarily many other values whose reference counts now go to zero.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    I'm quite familiar with it. Compared with, e.g. Rust, it very much feels like an also-ran. And Rust has incredible momentum right now.
- rcruzeiro 8y ago
  Obj-C is 35 years old and it doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon. As for " people/businesses are going back to web instead of App" that's something I've been hearing for 5+ years now but the app ecosystem seems to be doing just fine. That is not to say that some ideas aren't best suited for the web but saying that apps have been losing to the web is a long stretch. To put it simple: there is the web and there are apps. If the app you intend on implementing can be fully replaced by a website, then, by all means, implement it as a website.
  - robertAngst 8y ago
    >Obj-C is 35 years old and it doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon. What continues to be written in Obj C? Unlike its C and C++ counterparts, embedded work is not written in Obj C.
    - rcruzeiro 8y ago
      Pretty much all of the Apple core frameworks and it's unrealistic to think everything will be rewritten in Swift in the next few years. Besides that, you have countless applications for MacOS/iOS that are profitable and will be maintained for the foreseeable future. I guess your point was "what is the relevance of Obj-C outside of the apple ecosystem?" and the answer to that you already know: pretty much none. But given that the apple ecosystem isn't going anywhere anytime soon, Obj-C will continue to be used for better or worse. Swift on the other hand will gain all the relevance that Obj-C is losing within this ecosystem and it also has the potential of gaining a lot of relevance outside of apple as well (although it's not there yet).
      - robertAngst 8y ago
        >But given that the apple ecosystem isn't going anywhere anytime soon, Obj-C will continue to be used for better or worse. What is considered soon? 5 years? That is enough to go from Facebook to Myspace. Claims about Swift seem to neglect the world changing power of Javascript.
- coldcode 8y ago
  Yeah Apple is going out of business as usual, they only made $24B gross profit in the past quarter, did your employer do that? All mobile phone manufacturers are having sales issues including Samsung as everyone these days has a phone and competition for features has jacked up prices too high in the industry. Swift is going just fine, as is Kotlin (its kin in the Java universe) and Rust and Go. Objective-C might be slowing fading away, but then its a 35 year old language being replaced by Swift.

I love the momentum around Swift these days, and the LSP looks very interesting.

by sgt 8y ago

I love the momentum around Swift these days, and the LSP looks very interesting.

What momentum? From the Apple team? Sales and stock price are plummeting at Apple. And from another HN thread, developers are finding people/businesses are going back to web instead of App. Out of all the languages, Swift and Obj C are my 'how much longer until they go away?' languages. Is there anything showing growth? EDIT: Obligatory, Apple users can't handle talking about Apple.

kkarakk 8y ago
the server side swift panel at apple's conf was supposedly so full there were people standing. people are definitely interested.
lupinglade 8y ago
Have you used Swift? It’s not going away, it’s only going to grow.
- miguelrochefort 8y ago
  Huh? What makes you think that?
- lmm 8y ago
  Blind assertion is not an argument. What makes Swift a worthwhile/interesting/valuable language outside of the iOS ecosystem? As far as I can see it's yet another language with basically the ML featureset and nothing else; there are certainly worse starting points, but what reasons are there to adopt Swift that don't apply to OCaml or F#, both of which are more established (to say nothing of Rust/Haskell/Scala that actually offer substantive features that other ML-family languages don't have).
  - the_duke 8y ago
    Swift is kind of like Rust with garbage collection and more convenience baked in. It's a pretty nice language with a lot of adoption due to it being nicer and much more modern than ObjectiveC. It's not going anywhere. There are also companies like IBM pushing for Swift on the server. Personally the bad Linux support makes it uninteresting for me right now.
    - lmm 8y ago
      > Swift is kind of like Rust with garbage collection and more convenience baked in. Sure - but again, OCaml or F# have been there for decades.
      - rcruzeiro 8y ago
        But to be fair neither OCaml nor F# picked up any significant traction (at least not compared to Swift).
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      AIUI, Swift uses reference counting, not fully-general GC. So, it's really not different from Rust from that POV, other than the fact that Rust can avoid the overhead of atomic refcount updates (or sometimes of reference counting at all) in many cases where Swift requires it. It also seems a bit silly to push for Swift on the backend when excellent and well-supported alternatives exist such as Rust, Go and others.
      - lmm 8y ago
        > AIUI, Swift uses reference counting, not fully-general GC. So, it's really not different from Rust from that POV, other than the fact that Rust can avoid the overhead of atomic refcount updates (or sometimes of reference counting at all) in many cases where Swift requires it. No, ARC is a kind of GC. In particular, you have the same pausing behaviour as mark/sweep GC, because freeing any value might result in having to free arbitrarily many other values whose reference counts now go to zero.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  I'm quite familiar with it. Compared with, e.g. Rust, it very much feels like an also-ran. And Rust has incredible momentum right now.
rcruzeiro 8y ago
Obj-C is 35 years old and it doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon. As for " people/businesses are going back to web instead of App" that's something I've been hearing for 5+ years now but the app ecosystem seems to be doing just fine. That is not to say that some ideas aren't best suited for the web but saying that apps have been losing to the web is a long stretch. To put it simple: there is the web and there are apps. If the app you intend on implementing can be fully replaced by a website, then, by all means, implement it as a website.
- robertAngst 8y ago
  >Obj-C is 35 years old and it doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon. What continues to be written in Obj C? Unlike its C and C++ counterparts, embedded work is not written in Obj C.
  - rcruzeiro 8y ago
    Pretty much all of the Apple core frameworks and it's unrealistic to think everything will be rewritten in Swift in the next few years. Besides that, you have countless applications for MacOS/iOS that are profitable and will be maintained for the foreseeable future. I guess your point was "what is the relevance of Obj-C outside of the apple ecosystem?" and the answer to that you already know: pretty much none. But given that the apple ecosystem isn't going anywhere anytime soon, Obj-C will continue to be used for better or worse. Swift on the other hand will gain all the relevance that Obj-C is losing within this ecosystem and it also has the potential of gaining a lot of relevance outside of apple as well (although it's not there yet).
    - robertAngst 8y ago
      >But given that the apple ecosystem isn't going anywhere anytime soon, Obj-C will continue to be used for better or worse. What is considered soon? 5 years? That is enough to go from Facebook to Myspace. Claims about Swift seem to neglect the world changing power of Javascript.
coldcode 8y ago
Yeah Apple is going out of business as usual, they only made $24B gross profit in the past quarter, did your employer do that? All mobile phone manufacturers are having sales issues including Samsung as everyone these days has a phone and competition for features has jacked up prices too high in the industry. Swift is going just fine, as is Kotlin (its kin in the Java universe) and Rust and Go. Objective-C might be slowing fading away, but then its a 35 year old language being replaced by Swift.