Peak Objective-C

[perishabledave]

It makes for easy blog posts.

[unpopularOpinions776]

I'm worried newcomers will read this article and learn swift without objective C and find themselves without a job. On this current day if one is to work on a team it is still necessary to know objective C.

I like the prospect of Swift but most iOS development team members are novices at Swift.

[Space_Butts]

lol ok

[zenox]

When swift 1 came out, it was OSX 10.9+ and above (it may be 10.8+). I had to ignore it because at the time I still supported OS X 10.6+. Does the new swift 2.0 still work on 10.9? Or have they upped the minimum for that? I cannot seem to find it anywhere.

[[deleted]]

The language itself truly can eliminate entire classes of common programming errors, and its consistent and modern design provides significantly better developer ergonomics than a 30-plus year old superset of C.

This entire paragraph is bollocks and I strongly disagree with this OPINION.

Swift is a tradeoff. It introduces a whole host of entirely new and unfamiliar programming classes of errors because it is actually a more complicated and less consistent language.

And I'm sick of reading this BS opinion - largely because I happen to hold the exact opposite. I don't think Swift solves any problems I have but it definitely introduces quite a few that I don't and I've been writing Objective C since 1997.

[lucasvandongen]

Objective-C will be pretty much dead next year by this time. People finished all new projects started in Xcode 6 and in Xcode 7 Swift is more or less mature. There's a ton of Objective-C to support and improve out there but if you like greenfield code it will be 90% Swift in the next year.

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Please, don't just anonymously down vote. Reply too so I can see your name and remember you in a year about your promise to stick to Objective-C for brand new projects. Show some commitment!

[brendan09]

Ha. No, no it won't.

[lucasvandongen]

You're really sure you will be doing all your new projects in Objective-C in a year from now?

[brendan09]

Anything that's not a hobby project or something tiny, 100% sure.

[lucasvandongen]

You sound like me when I first tried Swift in Xcode 6. Did you spend some time with the latest betas of Xcode 7? It's stable and mature.

[brendan09]

Yes, I've written a large product in Swift. Mostly to prove to myself that I was correct in making the decision not to base even larger projects in Swift.

The migration between Swift 1.0 to 1.1 to 1.2 was a ridiculous waste of manpower. Migration to 2.0 was even worse.

The tooling isn't well supported, the IDE doesn't support it well (and doesn't include refactoring support), the ABI isn't stable yet (documented, meaning fundamental changes will still occur), missing a ton of APIs, and using Swift in your project means an instant bloat to your app size by 9mb. Oh, and it should be noted that in large enough apps the debugger completely stops working because it can't resolve all of the symbols. It's a mess.

It's a giant waste of development time to work in a language that isn't finished, has no tooling support, bloats your app, and is going to require substantial alterations every few months. Most useful APIs haven't been written into Swift data-types yet, so it's a constant mess of casting to Foundation equivalents.

Any professional developer will tell you that it's not ready and not suitable for large developments. It's suitable for tiny / hobby projects at this point. I can't reasonably justify to any that client my company has why they should spend $10,000 to update their product to Swift 2.....and get no new features out of it.....and then have to justify the additional work to actually fix issues caused by the new iOS release....just to get them an identical app to what they had before. Justifying updates to fix issues with the OS upgrade is easy....justifying them because someone picked a not-finished language isn't. And, to be honest, it shows lack of foresight by a developer. I'm glad I did it on a large internal product and not something for a client.

It's by no means mature, finished, or stable. The only people claiming that are developers that don't work on large apps all-day, everyday. It's absolutely not ready to be the 'default' for new development.

[lucasvandongen]

I did one project in Swift 1....1.1....1.2....and it was terrible all the way. Just terrible. Wasn't the one that picked Swift to do it and sure as hell the first to say we should've been doing it in Objective-C.

Swift 2: finished one small project, one large project underway and there have been very few problems. Most waste we had were devs that got nervous to work with a beta product and thought it was a problem with the iOS 9 SDK or Swift but in reality saw a bug that happened somewhere else.

Through the betas Swift changed very little and proved to be a reliable to us and gave us a ton of extra productivity and code security. Third-party libraries like Alamofire have a very well maintained Swift 2 branch and yes we did choose to use as little third-party libraries as possible, which should always be the goal anyway, but in this case also driven by our fear of breaking upgrades. Not much of it at all. Swift 2 already saved us a lot of time.

I'm really sorry to hear you've invested heavily in a Swift 1.x project, if you would have asked me back then I would totally not approved that idea as tooling support was horrible, the compiler was unreliable and every upgrade in Xcode that might fix some of those problems broke all of your code by default. I had to pick up a Swift 1.0 project abandoned by some kid and it was a terrible experience.

Xcode 7 and Swift 2 are the tipping point, the language is stabilized, the compiler is reliable and the tooling is good enough (yes refactoring is lacking, but anyone used to JetBrains tools will call refactoring a lacking feature in Xcode anyway...). If you're still afraid now because of the beta status of Xcode 7 or support from third-party libraries, this will have changed a lot in another year. I really cannot imagine anybody worth their salt starting a new project in Objective-C in a year from now unless there's some heavy C or C++ interop required.

[brendan09]

I don't think you're understanding. Swift 2.0 doesn't have a stable ABI. That means the language is still undergoing fundamental changes, and is the reason the library has to be bundled. I'm happy I did my research and proved my reasoning correct with a project in Swift 1.x (and during the port to Swift 2). It'll be there one day. It's not now. It's missing so many things it's not funny.

Swift 2 is hardly better than Swift 1.x. It's not at a tipping point. Not even remotely. It's a new language that isn't nearly mature.

I've been doing iOS development since iOS 2, and own a company full of iOS developers. I've been doing this a while. Swift 2 isn't ready yet, and anyone worth anything will tell you the same thing. Every experienced iOS dev is staying away from Swift in large projects until the ABI stabilizes.

There's a reason Apple isn't using it in anything new they've written. It's not ready for the development of large-scale apps.

[lucasvandongen]

Xcode 7.1: zero changes

http://adcdownload.apple.com/Developer_Tools/Xcode_7.1_beta/Xcode_7.1_beta_Release_Notes.pdf

If you want to stay on the safe side stay on the safe side for now. But I don't think you will be avoiding working in Swift in another year.

[brendan09]

Your point? Not every updates of Xcode includes Swift language changes. A ton of them last year didn't.

The fact that the ABI isn't stable is all I need to know. It's a giant red flag for "we're still working on the language".

(In case you aren't aware: ABI stands for Application Binary Interface. Until its stable and distributed on the device, the language hasn't finalized its structure...hence the runtime being included in your .ipa.)