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It is not just the language but the frameworks. SwiftUI is a wreck, and still not mature even after 6-7+ years in 'production'. You still have to drop to UIKi

It is not just the language but the frameworks. SwiftUI is a wreck, and still not mature even after 6-7+ years in 'production'. You still have to drop to UIKit to do advanced UI, and for what it is, SwiftUI is just not practical enough for cases that are not trivial. The trouble is that all new kids/engineer are learning it first, which means software wont get better. Apple need to improve it first, and I don't see advanced folks ditching UIKit anytime soon for advanced UI.

LudwigNagasena 1y ago
Seems like another case of the general trend in software development of easy things becoming easier and hard things becoming harder.
firecall 1y ago
That’s a shame! I haven’t used Swift UI in a couple of years, but I always thought the basics of it were excellent. They got the declarative API foundations right I thought. Shame it’s still flakey. The preview used to crash constantly last time I used it.
krzat 1y ago
What baffles me the most is testability of SwiftUI. It simply does not exist.
- sunnybeetroot 1y ago
  This is true, I wonder what Apple uses internally to test SwiftUI.
interpol_p 1y ago
I don't completely agree with you. Having used both SwiftUI and UIKit extensively, I value both of them and think they are both quite strong in different areas I have published a word game written entirely in SwiftUI [1], the effects and animations would have been much more difficult to do in UIKit, and the app itself would have been hairier to write and maintain [2]. I also track crashes, and this particular app has had four crashes in the past year, so I am very pleased with the stability That said, there are definitely times, as you say, where you have to drop to UIKit. For the word game mentioned above, I had to drop down to UIKit to observe low-level keyboard events in order to support hardware keyboard input without explicitly using a control that accepts text input SwiftUI is mature, it's pretty advanced — especially for graphics and animation heavy UI. It has limitations, particularly around advanced input event handling, as well as the application/scene lifecycle I plan to continue to use both UIKit and SwiftUI where they make sense. It's easy enough to bridge between them with UIHostingController and UIViewRepresentable [1] https://retrogram.app https://retrogram.app [2] Specific examples include: image and alpha masking is trivial in SwiftUI, Metal Shaders can be applied with a one-line modifier, gradients are easy and automatic, SwiftUI's Timeline+Canvas is very performant and more powerful than custom drawing with UIKit. Creating glows, textured text and images, blurs and geometry-based transitions is much easier in SwiftUI

LudwigNagasena 1y ago

Seems like another case of the general trend in software development of easy things becoming easier and hard things becoming harder.

firecall 1y ago

That’s a shame! I haven’t used Swift UI in a couple of years, but I always thought the basics of it were excellent. They got the declarative API foundations right I thought. Shame it’s still flakey. The preview used to crash constantly last time I used it.

krzat 1y ago

What baffles me the most is testability of SwiftUI. It simply does not exist.

sunnybeetroot 1y ago
This is true, I wonder what Apple uses internally to test SwiftUI.

interpol_p 1y ago

I don't completely agree with you. Having used both SwiftUI and UIKit extensively, I value both of them and think they are both quite strong in different areas I have published a word game written entirely in SwiftUI [1], the effects and animations would have been much more difficult to do in UIKit, and the app itself would have been hairier to write and maintain [2]. I also track crashes, and this particular app has had four crashes in the past year, so I am very pleased with the stability That said, there are definitely times, as you say, where you have to drop to UIKit. For the word game mentioned above, I had to drop down to UIKit to observe low-level keyboard events in order to support hardware keyboard input without explicitly using a control that accepts text input SwiftUI is mature, it's pretty advanced — especially for graphics and animation heavy UI. It has limitations, particularly around advanced input event handling, as well as the application/scene lifecycle I plan to continue to use both UIKit and SwiftUI where they make sense. It's easy enough to bridge between them with UIHostingController and UIViewRepresentable [1] https://retrogram.app https://retrogram.app [2] Specific examples include: image and alpha masking is trivial in SwiftUI, Metal Shaders can be applied with a one-line modifier, gradients are easy and automatic, SwiftUI's Timeline+Canvas is very performant and more powerful than custom drawing with UIKit. Creating glows, textured text and images, blurs and geometry-based transitions is much easier in SwiftUI