Hacker News Reader

Comment by dimillian | Hacker News Reader

It's rough, not because of Swift, but because of Xcode. I really love Swift, but it take some time to get up to the speed you are used with Objective-c. Mostly because of the new syntax, but also because Xcode is very buggy around code completion, linking and syntax highlighting.

But for a new app, I would recommend Swift to anyone, it's light, and readable, I really like it.

View on HN

Debugging Swift is terrible right now in Xcode, unless I am not doing it right. Some values can be seen, others are inexplicably missing. Coming from Java/IntelliJ, it's a hopeless mess.

I hope that Xcode/Swift gets better in the debugging department soon. NSLog() is a rough way to see values. It's just so 1996.

print and println just works for any value. But yeah, breakpoint and PO at doesn't work for debugging at the moment.

>I hope that Xcode/Swift gets better in the debugging department soon. NSLog() is a rough way to see values. It's just so 1996.

Well, XCode also has the Swift Playground, with live values updating next to your code etc. Java/IntelliJ don't have that (of course XCode's implementation is beta too, and might not work on some cases).

Playground however is just a place for playing with snippets of code. And experiment and learn environment. If you have a bug in a running app, it's just not possible to recreate the problem except for the simplest of apps.

I had some big issues with code completion in Swift in Xcode. The completion engine regularly crashed and all syntax highlighting and warnings/errors disappeared. A total nightmare when you're trying to learn a new language.

>The completion engine regularly crashed and all syntax highlighting and warnings/errors disappeared. A total nightmare when you're trying to learn a new language.

Kids these days... We had to learn new languages with no "syntax highlighting", no "completion engine", no tutorials, no reference sites and no internet in general. If we were lucky we had some kind of printed manual -- not always.

I may be a kid (24) but I also remember those days from learning Pascal :)

+1 to this. It's like we're back in Xcode 3.x again with Swift.

Amen to this. Almost my feelings exactly

Reply on news.ycombinator.com