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I used to see the compiler run away, consuming all available RAM and CPU, back in the early days of Mac OS X. So this is not necessarily something unique to Swi

I used to see the compiler run away, consuming all available RAM and CPU, back in the early days of Mac OS X. So this is not necessarily something unique to Swift. Then there was the ill-fated garbage collection system that got bolted onto Objective C. At some point after the compiler got fixed, ARC was added, and the GC was deprecated, in 2012, is the point in time when Cocoa development felt solid (to me). I don’t know how you’d escape this. Other platforms have their own problems. As far as I can tell, they’re all science projects, because our understanding of language design and library design keeps changing.

tambourine_man 3y ago
Perhaps, but I feel Swift was too ambitious too early.
- klodolph 3y ago
  I think a certain amount of ambition is necessary if you’re making a language for general use. You get important feedback from real-world use, and that means you need a population of developers willing to take risks on new languages. If we go by the Objective C timeline, Swift will be pretty good in the year 2042.
iainmerrick 3y ago
At some point after the compiler got fixed, ARC was added, and the GC was deprecated, in 2012, is the point in time when Cocoa development felt solid (to me). Seconded -- Obj-C was really nice to work with at that time. I do like a lot of the new stuff in Swift, but in many ways it’s a return to the bad old days in terms of the overall dev experience.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  > I do like a lot of the new stuff in Swift, but in many ways it’s a return to the bad old days in terms of the overall dev experience. It depends on the angle you’re coming from IMO. For me Swift has been a major improvement overall for a couple reasons: it has a ton of quality of life features that can only be had in Objective-C with a laundry list of CocoaPods, and its type system allows me to do fairly major refactors on a regular basis that I wouldn’t dream of trying with Obj-C. Not having to maintain header files is also a bigger deal than I thought it’d be…
  - iainmerrick 3y ago
    Yeah, it would be very hard to go back to a more primitive type system. On balance I prefer Swift.

tambourine_man 3y ago

Perhaps, but I feel Swift was too ambitious too early.

klodolph 3y ago
I think a certain amount of ambition is necessary if you’re making a language for general use. You get important feedback from real-world use, and that means you need a population of developers willing to take risks on new languages. If we go by the Objective C timeline, Swift will be pretty good in the year 2042.

iainmerrick 3y ago

At some point after the compiler got fixed, ARC was added, and the GC was deprecated, in 2012, is the point in time when Cocoa development felt solid (to me). Seconded -- Obj-C was really nice to work with at that time. I do like a lot of the new stuff in Swift, but in many ways it’s a return to the bad old days in terms of the overall dev experience.

kitsunesoba 3y ago
> I do like a lot of the new stuff in Swift, but in many ways it’s a return to the bad old days in terms of the overall dev experience. It depends on the angle you’re coming from IMO. For me Swift has been a major improvement overall for a couple reasons: it has a ton of quality of life features that can only be had in Objective-C with a laundry list of CocoaPods, and its type system allows me to do fairly major refactors on a regular basis that I wouldn’t dream of trying with Obj-C. Not having to maintain header files is also a bigger deal than I thought it’d be…
- iainmerrick 3y ago
  Yeah, it would be very hard to go back to a more primitive type system. On balance I prefer Swift.