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Surely developer productivity and maintainability have increased from the ObjC days, no? Swift criticisms aside, it certainly allows access to more ergonomic hi

Surely developer productivity and maintainability have increased from the ObjC days, no? Swift criticisms aside, it certainly allows access to more ergonomic high-level coding patterns.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
A big one that I feel is under appreciated is how Swift has rooted out nearly all passing around of untyped data, untyped dictionaries, casting without checking, etc in Apple platform projects. I don’t mind Objective-C when I’m the one writing it and can ensure that the code is responsibly written, but it wasn’t unusual to have to work on existing Obj-C codebases littered with untyped data, casts, etc some amount of which was inevitably erroneous and only seemed to work correctly. Chasing down the origin points of data, fixing a laundry list of method selectors, and adding in checks always sucked with the compiler doing little to give you a hand. With Swift, even in codebases with poor hygiene fixing things is easier since the compiler will yell when something’s wrong.
- ab5tract 1y ago
  Just curious, but would it have been feasible to update the Objective-C compiler to reduce these pain points? Or was there issue more intrinsic to the design of the language itself?
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    With the caveat that I’m not all that knowledgeable about compilers, as I understand it, no not really. The compiler’s “reasoning” about types is extremely rudimentary and is easy to “deceive” because like a C compiler, it trusts that the dev knows what they’re doing. This can enable an experienced vet to move quickly due to low resistance, but makes the occasional slipups that even vets commit easy to miss. You’d basically need to implement the Swift compiler in the Objective-C compiler to get similar type safety, but to make it work you would probably need to change various bits of syntax, drop inline intermixture of C and C++, and remove a lot of Obj-C’s dynamism, basically making it a new language. That’s why Swift was created, and in the past Obj-C’s bracketed smalltalk-like syntax had proven unpopular amongst newcoming devs, so they chose a more mainstream syntax instead.
    - ab5tract 1y ago
      Thanks for this! More or less what I expected, just wanted to be sure.

Surely developer productivity and maintainability have increased from the ObjC days, no? Swift criticisms aside, it certainly allows access to more ergonomic high-level coding patterns.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

A big one that I feel is under appreciated is how Swift has rooted out nearly all passing around of untyped data, untyped dictionaries, casting without checking, etc in Apple platform projects. I don’t mind Objective-C when I’m the one writing it and can ensure that the code is responsibly written, but it wasn’t unusual to have to work on existing Obj-C codebases littered with untyped data, casts, etc some amount of which was inevitably erroneous and only seemed to work correctly. Chasing down the origin points of data, fixing a laundry list of method selectors, and adding in checks always sucked with the compiler doing little to give you a hand. With Swift, even in codebases with poor hygiene fixing things is easier since the compiler will yell when something’s wrong.

ab5tract 1y ago
Just curious, but would it have been feasible to update the Objective-C compiler to reduce these pain points? Or was there issue more intrinsic to the design of the language itself?
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  With the caveat that I’m not all that knowledgeable about compilers, as I understand it, no not really. The compiler’s “reasoning” about types is extremely rudimentary and is easy to “deceive” because like a C compiler, it trusts that the dev knows what they’re doing. This can enable an experienced vet to move quickly due to low resistance, but makes the occasional slipups that even vets commit easy to miss. You’d basically need to implement the Swift compiler in the Objective-C compiler to get similar type safety, but to make it work you would probably need to change various bits of syntax, drop inline intermixture of C and C++, and remove a lot of Obj-C’s dynamism, basically making it a new language. That’s why Swift was created, and in the past Obj-C’s bracketed smalltalk-like syntax had proven unpopular amongst newcoming devs, so they chose a more mainstream syntax instead.
  - ab5tract 1y ago
    Thanks for this! More or less what I expected, just wanted to be sure.