4 ms·

I have a theory that this year tons of stuff was rewritten in Swift, because with the lockdown of the ABI it's now possible to write libraries in Swift. This mi

by chubs 7y ago

I have a theory that this year tons of stuff was rewritten in Swift, because with the lockdown of the ABI it's now possible to write libraries in Swift. This might be why this year is a bumper crop of bugs.

saagarjha 7y ago
Very little has been rewritten in Swift.
- chubs 7y ago
  Really? I read otherwise: https://blog.timac.org/2019/0926-state-of-swift-ios13/ https://blog.timac.org/2019/0926-state-of-swift-ios13/ It'd be hard to know unless you worked there. It's just a wild theory, I might be wrong :)
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    That's a very small fraction of the binaries that ship in the OS.
  - dep_b 7y ago
    It makes very little sense for a resource constrained company to rewrite stuff that just works in Swift especially when it has a lot of low-level code. What they do sometimes is adding a Swift-friendly API layer around the Objective-C(++) code. Newer libraries that are not too low-level oriented might get written in Swift nowadays.
    - Someone 7y ago
      ”It makes very little sense for a resource constrained company to rewrite stuff” I don’t think ”for a resource constrained company” makes a difference there. That’s good, because I have a hard time thinking of Apple as resource constrained.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        Apple doesn't actually have a lot of engineers on most projects.
        TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        The resources are there to hire engineers. If they're not being used to hire engineers that's a management choice, not a resource constraint.
        saagarjha 7y ago
        It's certainly a management choice. I don't think Apple would be better served by just going out and hiring more engineers.
        greggman2 7y ago
        I wonder if that is true in reality. I know at one company I interviewed maybe 80 people. Of those I think 3 or 4 were hired. The point being it was hard to find qualified people. You could argue they should offer more money and they'd get more applicants. Say they offered 4x what they are offering now. They'd likely just end up with a bidding war with the other rich tech companies and so in the end nothing would happen (if all the companies raise their salaries then it seems arguable that there'd be little affect on applicants). Other solutions might be longer term like investing in education or hiring less experienced people and training. Others might be opening more remote offices hoping to find more talent in other locations. All I'm really saying is as rich as Apple is I don't think hiring more engineers is as easy as just deciding to hire more.

by chubs 7y ago

saagarjha 7y ago

Very little has been rewritten in Swift.

chubs 7y ago
Really? I read otherwise: https://blog.timac.org/2019/0926-state-of-swift-ios13/ https://blog.timac.org/2019/0926-state-of-swift-ios13/ It'd be hard to know unless you worked there. It's just a wild theory, I might be wrong :)
- saagarjha 7y ago
  That's a very small fraction of the binaries that ship in the OS.
- dep_b 7y ago
  It makes very little sense for a resource constrained company to rewrite stuff that just works in Swift especially when it has a lot of low-level code. What they do sometimes is adding a Swift-friendly API layer around the Objective-C(++) code. Newer libraries that are not too low-level oriented might get written in Swift nowadays.
  - Someone 7y ago
    ”It makes very little sense for a resource constrained company to rewrite stuff” I don’t think ”for a resource constrained company” makes a difference there. That’s good, because I have a hard time thinking of Apple as resource constrained.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Apple doesn't actually have a lot of engineers on most projects.
      - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        The resources are there to hire engineers. If they're not being used to hire engineers that's a management choice, not a resource constraint.
        saagarjha 7y ago
        It's certainly a management choice. I don't think Apple would be better served by just going out and hiring more engineers.
        greggman2 7y ago
        I wonder if that is true in reality. I know at one company I interviewed maybe 80 people. Of those I think 3 or 4 were hired. The point being it was hard to find qualified people. You could argue they should offer more money and they'd get more applicants. Say they offered 4x what they are offering now. They'd likely just end up with a bidding war with the other rich tech companies and so in the end nothing would happen (if all the companies raise their salaries then it seems arguable that there'd be little affect on applicants). Other solutions might be longer term like investing in education or hiring less experienced people and training. Others might be opening more remote offices hoping to find more talent in other locations. All I'm really saying is as rich as Apple is I don't think hiring more engineers is as easy as just deciding to hire more.