3 ms·

I tried to get into learning Swift/UI several months back and was pretty disappointed how buggy the whole thing is, even when you're trying to do pretty basic t

by hbn 4y ago

I tried to get into learning Swift/UI several months back and was pretty disappointed how buggy the whole thing is, even when you're trying to do pretty basic things. It seems like a lot of the iOS veterans are still not interested in switching to it so who knows, maybe I'll come back to that in the future when it's actually production-ready like Apple claims it is.

herodotus 4y ago
Strange, but this was not my experience. I found it took me a while to wrap my head around the way SwiftUI works, and the documentation was really bad. But buggy, not.
- skohan 4y ago
  I wouldn't say I found it buggy, but rather limited. For instance even something simple like a list view has limited customisability, and some of the styling is mandatory unless you want to rebuild the entire component from scratch. It's a far cry from UITableView which can do just about anything. Also I found that once you get into stuff like animations, things get messy very quickly since everything has to be expressed declaratively. It's a nice idea for simple static views, but I really missed the ability to have separation of concerns the way you can with UIKit. Also I did find the tooling quite buggy. Like certain things would break the preview, and not give meaningful errors or just crash the Xcode process, so I would have to fix it through trial and error with commenting out sections of code until it would work again. I am sure it will improve, but with UIKit you can basically achieve anything, and SwiftUI still seems like it has a lot to figure out. I think it's a shame FRP has basically won front-end at this time, because while it's been a revelation in web (since it solves a lot of the problems which make web a mess) it carries a lot of its own problems, and I think there are going to be a lot of apps which will be horrific to maintain over the next few years.
  - herodotus 4y ago
    All good points. Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

by hbn 4y ago

herodotus 4y ago

Strange, but this was not my experience. I found it took me a while to wrap my head around the way SwiftUI works, and the documentation was really bad. But buggy, not.

skohan 4y ago
I wouldn't say I found it buggy, but rather limited. For instance even something simple like a list view has limited customisability, and some of the styling is mandatory unless you want to rebuild the entire component from scratch. It's a far cry from UITableView which can do just about anything. Also I found that once you get into stuff like animations, things get messy very quickly since everything has to be expressed declaratively. It's a nice idea for simple static views, but I really missed the ability to have separation of concerns the way you can with UIKit. Also I did find the tooling quite buggy. Like certain things would break the preview, and not give meaningful errors or just crash the Xcode process, so I would have to fix it through trial and error with commenting out sections of code until it would work again. I am sure it will improve, but with UIKit you can basically achieve anything, and SwiftUI still seems like it has a lot to figure out. I think it's a shame FRP has basically won front-end at this time, because while it's been a revelation in web (since it solves a lot of the problems which make web a mess) it carries a lot of its own problems, and I think there are going to be a lot of apps which will be horrific to maintain over the next few years.
- herodotus 4y ago
  All good points. Thanks for your thoughtful reply.