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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

it's the second time this week i hear about reactive cocoa.I'm starting to hate uikit with a passion, but what's so special about it ?

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iOS engineer who worked on the Fabric app here :) I gave a talk about this topic at a Swift conference last year, if you wanna check that out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ent6LJDIB3I

Maybe you can answer who was the person that decided that your library was so special that you have to use a damn application to add it to a project, rather than use the same exact procedures to add a library that every other library uses? No, I don't want to use your application to add the library, and no, I don't want to have to go through the onboarding every single time I need to add it or update it.

i was really hesitant when i saw how fabric is supposed to be installed, using a mac app, but i've got to admit that it's a really pleasant experience so far.

hi, thanks for sharing. one question though : to me, the hardest and most convoluted api in cocoa isn't related to model handling but to the view : doing simple things like a tableview reload immediately followed by a scroll, or animation composition when updating data always is a problem because the way uikit elements work internaly is quite opaque ( and the fact that there are three orthogonal api to position a view don't help).

So the fact that reactive cocoa tries to hide the notion of state transition makes me wonder how you can then deal with UIKit views animations api ( collection flow animations or tableview begin updates, no to mention view controllers interactive transitions).

I've wondered if using a future based api for view animations wouldn't be a solution..

I use the ObjC ReactiveCocoa in a big project and, albeit the idea behind it is very nice the lack of debug integration is hard. No the framework issue - but lldb is not good at this kind of tracing... Even, if, to be honest the way RAC is integrated into the app is maybe the issue. The story is a bit better on Swift, because some part of the reactive ideas are "built in"(mapping, filtering), but it still can be hard to understand the flow of the app.

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