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Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

Read the eulogy when the base libraries are Swift...

When swift code that interacts with the base libraries is faster, and when swift code compiles faster.

Swift so far is a language that over promises and under delivers...

Yeah... I'm pretty certain the only code in iOS 9 that is written in Swift is the Calculator app, which was also the first app I remember Apple shipping that actually used their public version of UIKit; until iOS 4, when Apple dogfooding their library finally made UIKit "good", Apple was still using the as-yet-much-better private UIKit they had written for iOS 1 that shared very little... it even had its own UIScrollView called UIScroller and its own UITableView called UITable. While I'm sure the language keeps getting better as people provide feedback, the product isn't going to move past that "omg this is amazing" threshold until Apple dogfoods it, and until then Apple is just using everyone as guinea pigs ;P.

FWIW, I think Apple can't ship any base libraries that uses Swift until they finish ABI-compatibility, as they need to be working off the same base Swift runtime as the apps that would run against those libraries. Given that for the last year people have been shipping apps that link against an old-and-incompatible Swift runtime that Xcode bundles into your app, and given how the runtime is "intrusive" (putting stuff into the global Objective-C namespace, for example), it isn't even clear yet (so this may require more time on their end to build out more infrastructure) how they will be able to pull that off without saying "all Swift apps developed before now need to be reshipped or they will stop working on iOS 10".

Oh goodness. Having written some small apps in both Objective-C and Swift, I'm not even sure which language I should jump back into when I want to pick it up again.

Objective C, it has a more clear path at the moment.

What does that even mean?

Objective C has been around since the 1980s, it has a long history with NeXT and Apple thus is very mature. Code you write in Objective C now can reasonably be expected to stay very similar going forward. Swift however is still very much in the wind where you run into "well this language feature has not been implemented yet" and with each version that is released your code needs to be migrated or changed to accommodate the changes in the language. The path forward is clear with Objective C vs Swift where you just don't know if some of the issues will even be addressed. I've been writing Objective C since 2007 and Swift since shortly after it was released. Swift still has a long way to go before I would use it as the starting language for a new app that I expected to have users / maintain.

Swift is moving fast as you say, and is clearly receiving Apple's favor and attention. Any app that you start with objective-c today will end up with a legacy codebase in the next couple of years.

> FWIW, I think Apple can't ship any base libraries that uses Swift until they finish ABI-compatibility

You hit the nail on the head here. Until the ABI is finalized, Apple can't ship dynamic libraries to developers that are written in Swift. Swift won't be ready to fully replace Obj-C until this happens.

> ... until then Apple is just using everyone as guinea pigs.

Exactly. I'm not being judgemental about that, but I don't see myself wanting to invest time into being a guinea pig. If Apple wants to build a tool that only works in and for their walled garden, I won't donate any work to it.

I'm not sure, I've had great fun learning it, and writing it is usually really nice. Sure, there have been pains along the way, but the Apple engineers are doing an amazing job with evolving Swift, intelligently, and very quickly. It is the future, and for many developers I know, it is already part of the present.

How is it not an Apple spin on, say, Scala? Seems similar.

it(swift) feels that way to me too.. my first impressions were 'scala'.

Hearing one of the core engineers from the LLVM compiler team speak at some length about their aims and approach to Swift, it was cleat that they had reflected long and hard on the approaches of many other languages. This engineer had very informed and nuanced views on the strengths and weaknesses of pretty much any other language you asked about. I'm sure Scala was on this list, also "Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list" — http://www.nondot.org/sabre/

Scala and modern C++ had a baby

It's like Scala but without all the unknown performance wrappers and confusing code, and with a highly tuned runtime with a minimal library.

How is Scala not a Java spin on F#? It also seems similar.

I don't see how any of these comparisons diminish the languages in question.

It's certainly gotten much better with Swift 2.0, it feels like Apple finally tried to build an app with Swift 2.0 and fixed a lot of the stuff that is horribly broken.

I've been working on a medium-sized Swift 1.2 app for the last few months and, while it's come a long way from 1.0, I still don't think I'd recommend it for new work yet. Compile times are agonizingly long, even worse than C++.

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