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Swift 5.2
- ashton314 7y agoLooks like a solid update on first glance. I nearly tore my hair out last month building a SwiftUI app. The error messages were terrible—I had never seen such poor error messages. I'm so glad they're addressing that.
- dpeck 7y agoNo kidding. I really like swiftui, the declarative model is great and it’s so much less of a pain than React-native, but trying to decipher the error messages for it while I was learning swift was comically bad at times.
- hugozap 7y agoI'm curious about the major pains with React-native you experienced. Is it because of the toolchain for RN? or some specific scenario?
- ericlewis 7y agoAs a contributor to RN and someone who loves SwiftUI just as much: it’s mostly the toolchain. You have an unbelievably vertically integrated framework with SwiftUI.
- rauchp 7y agoDo you think SwiftUI is still too experimental to build out a production-ready app? I'm a RN dev leading the app development at our startup, but every time I check on SwiftUI I LOVE what I see. Sadly it looks like the final results are mostly tech demos rather than fully integrated apps. Thinking maybe we have to wait for a behemoth's adoption (like AirBnB & React Native) to take the ecosystem to the next level.
- ericlewis 7y agoI would say it just depends, which I know isn't satisfying as an answer. I shipped an app named Eggy which is all SwiftUI- but it isn't super complex exactly. There are still plenty of simple problems that are hard to get around. But you can definitely use it to replace pieces of an app.
- acarrera94 7y agoI also shipped an app for a client called Droplii. I definitely believe you can use it for production level apps. Productivity is through the roof. There are just a few small quirks, but I believe the pros out weigh the cons here.
- jamil7 7y agoI've shipped a small app in it and am collaborating on another currently. If you're looking to use it on your team I'd wait for this years online WWDC, see whats announced and evaluate from there.
- dpeck 7y agoSibling comment here mostly covered it, toolchain is kind of all over the place and build times are way faster with swiftui on my 2015 MacBook. Also with Combine and associated bits there is a lot less boilerplate around state that doesn’t have to be written. Also the disk space for the js ecosystem is beyond crazy and really bothers me.
- jamil7 7y agoCompared to native development the toolchain and dependencies are out of control and I'm unsure how it can really be improved, Expo does a decent job of abstracting some of it but you lose so much from the managed workflow that it makes me question the purpose of building a native app at all. I think the real threat that PWAs bring is to frameworks like React Native and Cordova rather than fully native apps which will likely always have specific use cases.
- SkyPuncher 7y agoSwift is one of my favorite languages. Until I hit a fucking error. Then I just want to be done with it.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoThe errors are so bad that it trains me to never write more than a few lines at a time without compiling/running it. The runtime errors can be comically bad, bucking you into a screen of assembly for the simplest of mistakes.
- saagarjha 7y agoPerhaps you have debug symbols disabled?
- fctorial 7y agoHow do they compare to cpp template errors?
- saagarjha 7y agoLess verbose, and usually (but not always) more understandable. I think it’s probably similar to what C++ errors will be with concepts.
- novok 7y agoI've learned you wait a couple of years before you start trying to use new major apple developer tech. Same thing with swift, it was better to wait until swift 3 or 4 before adopting it.
- auggierose 7y agoYeah, also for the DSL's you build yourself with the new 5.1 features, really bad error messages. If that would get better in 5.2, it would help a lot.
- rnantes 7y agoA great update to a safe and ergonomic language. The best is still yet to come with Swift on Windows and Android, SPM Resources, and of course Async/Await.
- hiitechk 7y agoIs Swift on Windows on the roadmap?
- jurip 7y agoTed Kremenek listed in his "On the road to Swift 6" post on the forums "Expand the number of platforms where Swift is available and supported" as the first item. (https://forums.swift.org/t/on-the-road-to-swift-6/32862 https://forums.swift.org/t/on-the-road-to-swift-6/32862) Saleem Abdulrasool, who has been working on Swift on Windows, was also recently added to the core team. So I don't know if it's actually on the roadmap, if one exists, but official support doesn't seem impossible.
- jurip 7y agoNot impossible indeed. Swift 5.3 will officially support Windows: https://swift.org/blog/5-3-release-process/ https://swift.org/blog/5-3-release-process/
- armadsen 7y agoYes! Swift 5.3 is planned to introduce official Windows support, led by Saleem Abdulrasool who has done a bunch of work on it. https://swift.org/blog/5-3-release-process/ https://swift.org/blog/5-3-release-process/
- dklend122 7y agoHow about swift Android?
- elpakal 7y agolooking forward to the improved build times!
- hashbig 7y agoAll I want is official Swift support for an http server, and a web frontend framework using SwiftUI.
- skavi 7y agoAn alternative would be Dart/Flutter, though I’ve heard web UI perf is awful atm.
- the_gipsy 7y agoAFAIK SwiftUI is derived from or inspired by The Elm Architecture. In any case for me, Elm has been extremely enjoyable, as a web frontend framework and language combo.
- hashbig 7y agoI am a huge Elm fan, and I have used it in many contexts. It is fair to say that in the last 10 years React has most influenced the way we write our UI and Elm has most influenced the way we manage our state on the frontend.
- xscott 7y agoHas anyone had good luck getting Swift running on Linux? Many versions ago, I had it working under Ubuntu, and it seemed really nice. I particularly liked having a REPL for this style of language. However since then, I've had very limited success under Ubuntu, CentOS, and Arch. Different failures on each. Every few releases or so I give it a go, but something always fails and I go back to working on some other pet project.
- saagarjha 7y agoAre the prebuilt toolchains (https://swift.org/download/ https://swift.org/download/) giving you trouble?
- xscott 7y agoI'm currently using Arch, so I don't think the prebuilt Ubuntu ones are going to work.
- resist_futility 7y agoMaybe just use the Docker builds?
- xscott 7y agoI know I'm out of fashion :-), but I don't really use containers for anything. I think Swift looks really nice, but when I check out other languages (such as Go, Rust, or any of the gazillion others), I don't have to jump through any hoops other than using the system package manager or something like "./configure; make install". I wish Swift was in this camp.
- pcr910303 7y ago> I don't have to jump through any hoops other than using the system package manager Wouldn't that be something the package manager should include? If you're using Arch, I'm pretty sure AUR have you covered... [0] [0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/swift/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/swift/
- abjecton 7y agoI see some huge changes there, including the error messages!
- pjmlp 7y agoSo import Glibc is still a thing?
- hiq 7y agoCan you expand on this?
- pjmlp 7y agoSwift still doesn't have a mature standard library implementation that works across all platforms. So you have to do OS specific imports directly, for basic stuff like calling a random number generator or handling IO. It is even done so on the introduction pages, https://swift.org/getting-started/ https://swift.org/getting-started/ Foundation outside Apple platforms is pretty much WIP.
- zerr 7y agoInteresting, although, at least they have a cross-platform random now (Int.random, Float.random, ...).