4 ms·

What makes code “Swifty”?

68 points by Austin_Conlon 7y ago

effnorwood 7y ago
*Schwifty
- nsxwolf 7y ago
  Show me what you’ve got!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
setpatchaddress 7y ago
The title here is misleading. Most of this applies to Objective-C. There's nothing wrong with the article as far as programming advice goes, but it has nothing to do with Swift idioms. > So, to make our code more “Swifty” from a performance point of view, sometimes all that we have to do [is literally the same thing we would do in Objective-C] Is anyone writing consistently good, up-to-date Swift documentation for experienced programmers? Some of the early books haven't been updated since the earliest Swift versions. SwiftUI is very poorly documented by Apple and much of the third-party SwiftUI docs are for the obsolete WWDC version.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Most of this applies to Objective-C. Objective-C’s type system is much poorer than Swift’s, and it lacks a number of expressive operations. The “before” examples are generally how a lot of people would actually write code in Objective-C.
  - refulgentis 7y ago
    Which ones? I wrote ObjC for 7 years, Swift for 3. I only looked at the first two examples, they both were generic programming advice, nothing to do with the language
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      The first three. Objective-C doesn't have enums with associated values and it's common to store things in heterogeneous collections or stringly-keyed collections. Creating protocols for generic constraints is also rare–informal protocols (respondsToSelector, anyone?) are instead quite prevalent. And Objective-C's "collection" APIs are much less powerful than Swift's: I might use a regex replacement instead of four calls to replacingOccurrences(of:with:), but it's the same principle.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- metalgearsolid 7y ago
  To answer your question: objc.io
  - oflannabhra 7y ago
    I’ll tack on a couple sources to this: http://pointfree.co http://pointfree.co - high quality content, emphasizing functional programming. https://oleb.net/blog/ https://oleb.net/blog/ - blog of Ole Begemann, co author of Advanced Swift (good resource itself) https://appventure.me https://appventure.me - Benedikt Terhechte’s topical guides to Swift features https://andybargh.com/blog/ https://andybargh.com/blog/ Andy Bargh’s topical articles
- plorkyeran 7y ago
  The first example utilizes a feature of Swift's type system which obj-c does not have (enums with associated values) to write code which is better than could be done in obj-c. This seems like a perfectly good example of improving code by making it more "Swifty", as one of the distinguishing features of Swift is that it has a more powerful type system than most mainstream languages. The second example is strange. It's improving the code by making it call the correct method from the standard library rather than the wrong one. I guess that's not bad advice, but I have no idea what it has to do with Swift in particular. The third one is a missed opportunity. Swift has some unusual ideas around how things should be named (partially inherited from Smalltalk via obj-c, but also partially new), but instead of talking about that it's just generic "give things useful names" advice that has little to do with Swift.
iddan 7y ago
Oh how wonderful will it be to program front end and backend web apps with Swift, I just can’t wait
- jamil7 7y ago
  I'm hoping apple starts to take the cross platform story more seriously. It sounds like it's a big topic for the release of 6. I find it to be a really pleasant and productive language to work in.
MR4D 7y ago
I’d love to see Sundell go and optimize the code on the Computer Language Shootout so we could see its potential in a swifty way.
bsaul 7y ago
there's always been something i wondered about swift : how does it compare to other PL in terms of performance ? The initial promise was to have it be comparable to other compiled languages ( java , c++, whatever), but i've yet to find a real benchmark. Or rather, the ones i've seen made it look more on the range of interpreted/dynamic languages ( ruby / python or node), at least for server side projects. Which came as a surprise to me. Has any real work been work on that issue somewhere ?
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Rather slow currently, thanks ARC. https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages
  - skohan 7y ago
    This is not a good representative benchmark for Swift. It uses lots of reference counted objects within tight loops, which is a worst-case for Swift. It's also not idiomatic Swift - classes are used in many places where they should not be. Also, it's a benchmark which needs special hardware to be run, so it's not easy to try to reproduce or improve on this result.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      The same conditions apply to all languages.
      - skohan 7y ago
        No they don't. GC language, for example, are more sensitive to memory pressure to reference counting overhead.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        First, Swift is also a GC language. Secondly, with exception of Java, the remaining ones on that benchmark support value types and native heap allocations.
Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
Idiomatic Swift code is called "Swifty". Idiomatic Python code is called "Pythonic". Idiomatic Java code is called "terrible".
skohan 7y ago
Performance is not really a USP of Swift. It's certainly possible to write high-performance Swift code (with the help of a lot of profiling) but if your main concern is performance, you would be much better served reaching for Rust or C/C++. IMO the most important things about Swift code is that it has nice safety features, and it is easy to write clear, self-documenting code.

68 points by Austin_Conlon 7y ago

effnorwood 7y ago

*Schwifty

nsxwolf 7y ago
Show me what you’ve got!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

setpatchaddress 7y ago

The title here is misleading. Most of this applies to Objective-C. There's nothing wrong with the article as far as programming advice goes, but it has nothing to do with Swift idioms. > So, to make our code more “Swifty” from a performance point of view, sometimes all that we have to do [is literally the same thing we would do in Objective-C] Is anyone writing consistently good, up-to-date Swift documentation for experienced programmers? Some of the early books haven't been updated since the earliest Swift versions. SwiftUI is very poorly documented by Apple and much of the third-party SwiftUI docs are for the obsolete WWDC version.

saagarjha 7y ago
> Most of this applies to Objective-C. Objective-C’s type system is much poorer than Swift’s, and it lacks a number of expressive operations. The “before” examples are generally how a lot of people would actually write code in Objective-C.
- refulgentis 7y ago
  Which ones? I wrote ObjC for 7 years, Swift for 3. I only looked at the first two examples, they both were generic programming advice, nothing to do with the language
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    The first three. Objective-C doesn't have enums with associated values and it's common to store things in heterogeneous collections or stringly-keyed collections. Creating protocols for generic constraints is also rare–informal protocols (respondsToSelector, anyone?) are instead quite prevalent. And Objective-C's "collection" APIs are much less powerful than Swift's: I might use a regex replacement instead of four calls to replacingOccurrences(of:with:), but it's the same principle.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
metalgearsolid 7y ago
To answer your question: objc.io
- oflannabhra 7y ago
  I’ll tack on a couple sources to this: http://pointfree.co http://pointfree.co - high quality content, emphasizing functional programming. https://oleb.net/blog/ https://oleb.net/blog/ - blog of Ole Begemann, co author of Advanced Swift (good resource itself) https://appventure.me https://appventure.me - Benedikt Terhechte’s topical guides to Swift features https://andybargh.com/blog/ https://andybargh.com/blog/ Andy Bargh’s topical articles
plorkyeran 7y ago
The first example utilizes a feature of Swift's type system which obj-c does not have (enums with associated values) to write code which is better than could be done in obj-c. This seems like a perfectly good example of improving code by making it more "Swifty", as one of the distinguishing features of Swift is that it has a more powerful type system than most mainstream languages. The second example is strange. It's improving the code by making it call the correct method from the standard library rather than the wrong one. I guess that's not bad advice, but I have no idea what it has to do with Swift in particular. The third one is a missed opportunity. Swift has some unusual ideas around how things should be named (partially inherited from Smalltalk via obj-c, but also partially new), but instead of talking about that it's just generic "give things useful names" advice that has little to do with Swift.

iddan 7y ago

Oh how wonderful will it be to program front end and backend web apps with Swift, I just can’t wait

jamil7 7y ago
I'm hoping apple starts to take the cross platform story more seriously. It sounds like it's a big topic for the release of 6. I find it to be a really pleasant and productive language to work in.

MR4D 7y ago

I’d love to see Sundell go and optimize the code on the Computer Language Shootout so we could see its potential in a swifty way.

bsaul 7y ago

there's always been something i wondered about swift : how does it compare to other PL in terms of performance ? The initial promise was to have it be comparable to other compiled languages ( java , c++, whatever), but i've yet to find a real benchmark. Or rather, the ones i've seen made it look more on the range of interpreted/dynamic languages ( ruby / python or node), at least for server side projects. Which came as a surprise to me. Has any real work been work on that issue somewhere ?

pjmlp 7y ago
Rather slow currently, thanks ARC. https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages
- skohan 7y ago
  This is not a good representative benchmark for Swift. It uses lots of reference counted objects within tight loops, which is a worst-case for Swift. It's also not idiomatic Swift - classes are used in many places where they should not be. Also, it's a benchmark which needs special hardware to be run, so it's not easy to try to reproduce or improve on this result.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    The same conditions apply to all languages.
    - skohan 7y ago
      No they don't. GC language, for example, are more sensitive to memory pressure to reference counting overhead.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        First, Swift is also a GC language. Secondly, with exception of Java, the remaining ones on that benchmark support value types and native heap allocations.

Sohcahtoa82 7y ago

Idiomatic Swift code is called "Swifty". Idiomatic Python code is called "Pythonic". Idiomatic Java code is called "terrible".

skohan 7y ago

Performance is not really a USP of Swift. It's certainly possible to write high-performance Swift code (with the help of a lot of profiling) but if your main concern is performance, you would be much better served reaching for Rust or C/C++. IMO the most important things about Swift code is that it has nice safety features, and it is easy to write clear, self-documenting code.