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I just don't get what purpose it really solves over UIKit. Everything seems far more complicated in SwiftUI, and the data dependence problems it solves did not

I just don't get what purpose it really solves over UIKit. Everything seems far more complicated in SwiftUI, and the data dependence problems it solves did not ever really seem to be a huge issue in UIKit anyway. Apple's sell for SwiftUI was "it's like going to a chef who knows how to cook for you" instead of "cooking yourself". But is that really a good thing? Do we really want to be taking less control of our applications when we write them? The worst part is all these tutorials that have to combine SwiftUI and UIKit because the former is very buggy in certain cases, like navigation trees on iOS have really janky animations using SwiftUI. So you have to coordinate all your Views using UIKit. It just seems barely easier to use SwiftUI most of the time. EDIT: Basically, in summary, it seems like a very complicated (look at the crazy language features they had to add for it) plus very opaque ("it magically does it for you just how you wanted") way to write the same apps you were already writing fine in UIKit and AppKit

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
I have some friends at Apple... The story goes something like this: SwiftUI came about because someone who has never been a software engineer, got concerned about losing mindshare to ReactNative et al. So this person created a "task force" to deal with the problem by tacking something on top of UIKit that resembles React, to create a "friendly" ingress funnel into the iOS world.
- andrekandre 4y ago
  > SwiftUI came about because someone who has never been a software engineer so... management?
- firecall 4y ago
  That sounds about right! I recently began developing with Flutter for a project. And whilst I dont love Flutter/Dart that much, I must admit that Google have done an amazing job of proving resources and documentation for the frameworks! The whole Flutter community and available resources feels very rich, welcoming and embracing! Tech like Flutter is fresh and exciting to a lot of people, and Apple is right to be worried! So say what you will about Flutter/Dart, love it or hate it, the docs and community are excellent!
  - wzwy 4y ago
    I’ve recently began developing with Flutter as well. Although I’m not sure about the community, but you’re right, the resources and guidance provided by Google are excellent especially for beginners. There’s a lot more variety of learning resources compared to other languages; there are texts, workshops, videos, code labs, etc. It’s also nice seeing members of the Flutter team facilitate some of the workshops themselves; it’s refreshing to see developers being involved in educating users, instead of ‘outsourcing’ everything to others.
astrange 4y ago
Writing controllers is complicated and underspecified in UIKit and AppKit; AppKit has old unmaintained "bindings", UIKit doesn't have them at all, and it seems to lead to third parties reinventing the whole stack rather than using any of it.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

I have some friends at Apple... The story goes something like this: SwiftUI came about because someone who has never been a software engineer, got concerned about losing mindshare to ReactNative et al. So this person created a "task force" to deal with the problem by tacking something on top of UIKit that resembles React, to create a "friendly" ingress funnel into the iOS world.

andrekandre 4y ago
> SwiftUI came about because someone who has never been a software engineer so... management?
firecall 4y ago
That sounds about right! I recently began developing with Flutter for a project. And whilst I dont love Flutter/Dart that much, I must admit that Google have done an amazing job of proving resources and documentation for the frameworks! The whole Flutter community and available resources feels very rich, welcoming and embracing! Tech like Flutter is fresh and exciting to a lot of people, and Apple is right to be worried! So say what you will about Flutter/Dart, love it or hate it, the docs and community are excellent!
- wzwy 4y ago
  I’ve recently began developing with Flutter as well. Although I’m not sure about the community, but you’re right, the resources and guidance provided by Google are excellent especially for beginners. There’s a lot more variety of learning resources compared to other languages; there are texts, workshops, videos, code labs, etc. It’s also nice seeing members of the Flutter team facilitate some of the workshops themselves; it’s refreshing to see developers being involved in educating users, instead of ‘outsourcing’ everything to others.

astrange 4y ago

Writing controllers is complicated and underspecified in UIKit and AppKit; AppKit has old unmaintained "bindings", UIKit doesn't have them at all, and it seems to lead to third parties reinventing the whole stack rather than using any of it.