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The main issue with SwiftUI is sheer lack of maturity. People don't think about it, but UIKit now has ~15 years of effort put into it, and got a serious boost

The main issue with SwiftUI is sheer lack of maturity. People don't think about it, but UIKit now has ~15 years of effort put into it, and got a serious boost from its shared roots with AppKit (even though big chunks of UIKit were freshly written, its structuring and API design were largely informed by AppKit), which has history tracing all the way back to the 1980s. Of course something as fresh out of the oven as SwiftUI is isn't going to be able to compare in terms of polish or capability. So for now I'm sticking to UIKit in the apps I'm responsible for. I think SwiftUI's day in the sun is coming, but it's not here quite yet. That doesn't mean that there aren't issues with how it's being engineered and documented, though. It has serious shortcomings that need to be shored up, and hopefully that happens with its maturation.

ricardobeat 4y ago
It is already three years old. I doubt AppKit, UIKit or any of the predecessors were in a bad state for three whole years after their launch.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I can’t speak for AppKit, but UIKit/Cocoa Touch was pretty rough early on. Major chunks of “standard” functionality were missing and standard widgets were somewhat inflexible. It was common to pull in third party libraries and write custom widget code for relatively basic things. Based on my experience, the UIKit dev experience didn’t start to reach the level of completeness it’s known for now until some time between iOS 7 and 9… at least that’s when I remember the number of “required” third party libraries start to steeply decline.
- nemo 4y ago
  >I doubt AppKit, UIKit or any of the predecessors were in a bad state for three whole years after their launch I was there for Cocoa development in Mac OS X 10.3. AppKit was not mature. I wasn't there but have heard it was less mature in '91 3 years into NextSTEP.
- Longhanks 4y ago
  AppKit was so not mature that Apple shipped its whole legacy UI framework Carbon for a decade to come, with even the Finder itself taking until 2009 to be rewritten in AppKit.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    That was a side effect from the likes of Adobe and Microsoft not wanting to rewrite their Mac OS flagship products into Cocoa than anything else regarding maturity.

ricardobeat 4y ago

It is already three years old. I doubt AppKit, UIKit or any of the predecessors were in a bad state for three whole years after their launch.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
I can’t speak for AppKit, but UIKit/Cocoa Touch was pretty rough early on. Major chunks of “standard” functionality were missing and standard widgets were somewhat inflexible. It was common to pull in third party libraries and write custom widget code for relatively basic things. Based on my experience, the UIKit dev experience didn’t start to reach the level of completeness it’s known for now until some time between iOS 7 and 9… at least that’s when I remember the number of “required” third party libraries start to steeply decline.
nemo 4y ago
>I doubt AppKit, UIKit or any of the predecessors were in a bad state for three whole years after their launch I was there for Cocoa development in Mac OS X 10.3. AppKit was not mature. I wasn't there but have heard it was less mature in '91 3 years into NextSTEP.
Longhanks 4y ago
AppKit was so not mature that Apple shipped its whole legacy UI framework Carbon for a decade to come, with even the Finder itself taking until 2009 to be rewritten in AppKit.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  That was a side effect from the likes of Adobe and Microsoft not wanting to rewrite their Mac OS flagship products into Cocoa than anything else regarding maturity.