Sales and stock price are plummeting at Apple. And from another HN thread, developers are finding people/businesses are going back to web instead of App.
Out of all the languages, Swift and Obj C are my 'how much longer until they go away?' languages.
Is there anything showing growth?
EDIT: Obligatory, Apple users can't handle talking about Apple.
What continues to be written in Obj C? Unlike its C and C++ counterparts, embedded work is not written in Obj C.
I guess your point was "what is the relevance of Obj-C outside of the apple ecosystem?" and the answer to that you already know: pretty much none. But given that the apple ecosystem isn't going anywhere anytime soon, Obj-C will continue to be used for better or worse.
Swift on the other hand will gain all the relevance that Obj-C is losing within this ecosystem and it also has the potential of gaining a lot of relevance outside of apple as well (although it's not there yet).
What is considered soon? 5 years? That is enough to go from Facebook to Myspace.
Claims about Swift seem to neglect the world changing power of Javascript.
This isn’t much an argument, but I find this a hilarious and quite ironic assertion considering the website you’ve put in your profile.
It works well for macOS.
But seriously, there are about one and a half billion iOS devices in active use, on a vibrant, alive market. That is an absolutely colossal market, and positing like all platforms are the same and therefore n platforms is better is a non-starter.
Ocaml? F#? If you're targeting that market they have no relevance.
The original guy's post was simply ridiculous. Apple has to accept reality that the smartphone market has matured and suddenly we're all writing web apps and abandoning the platform? To put it as succinctly as it can be stated: lol.
Sure. As long as Swift is the only way to program for iOS there will be people who have to use it for business reasons. But that's very different from claiming it's a growing/exciting/high-momentum language.
> The original guy's post was simply ridiculous. Apple has to accept reality that the smartphone market has matured and suddenly we're all writing web apps and abandoning the platform?
It's not going to disappear overnight. But smartphone sales are slowing (especially for Apple), the app store gold rush is over leaving an oversaturated marketplace, and a lot of unprofitable app makers are exiting the business one way or another.
There will always be room for great app makers to make money - just as some companies still make money selling desktop software. But I wouldn't call it "vibrant", and I would think long and hard before entering that market right now - it really feels like we're on a downturn at the moment, at least to me.
The app store "gold rush" has been over for almost a decade. Now it's lots of very profitable little niches, and a lot of companies doing very well for themselves.
It's a pretty nice language with a lot of adoption due to it being nicer and much more modern than ObjectiveC. It's not going anywhere.
There are also companies like IBM pushing for Swift on the server.
Personally the bad Linux support makes it uninteresting for me right now.
No, ARC is a kind of GC. In particular, you have the same pausing behaviour as mark/sweep GC, because freeing any value might result in having to free arbitrarily many other values whose reference counts now go to zero.
Automatic, I think, but yes.
> I mean, Rust literally has an Arc<> type!
Yes, but idiomatic Rust makes very limited use of it; if you do use an Arc in Rust you have visibility and control over when you unreference it. Whereas in idiomatic Swift you're doing unmanaged dereferences all over the place.
I mean, of course it's possible to implement garbage collection in your non-GC language. The difference between a GCed language and a non-GCed language is whether GC is implicit and pervasive, or explicit and manually controlled.
This is hardly a positive for Swift; Rust still collects its garbage as much as Swift does; it just does so more efficiently by making use of compile-time lifetime analysis (RAII-like), in addition to the RC technique that Swift uses.
Rust’s Arc and Rc types are never applied automatically.
Sure - but again, OCaml or F# have been there for decades.