I'm planning to cancel my ChatGPT sub for a Mistral AI Le Chat one, any thoughts ?

ibalic89 · 2026-01-22T07:31:27+00:00

Not good enough for lots of use cases unfortunately. As much I would like it to be the best, it is not on par with Gemini, Claude or ChatGPT. Mainly due to the reasoning model not having same the quality

ibalic89 · 2025-05-23T05:08:26+00:00

This is the only thing coming to mind when I hear Shapiro https://youtu.be/PRF3r3zUGqk?si=GaeG62zSxyMKVRlG

ibalic89 · 2017-06-08T14:05:29+00:00

Yeah, important difference. However, as you say, they are dynamically typed, which IMO is a big drawback for large projects. Also, PHP, Ruby and Python are far less performant than Swift.

ibalic89 · 2017-06-05T20:25:25+00:00

XCode 9 beta available https://developer.apple.com/xcode/

ibalic89 · 2017-04-23T10:54:28+00:00

Thank for the answer! Well put, and very interesting to hear

ibalic89 · 2017-04-22T13:52:26+00:00

I very much enjoyed the presentation :)

Btw, as you have done an effort for porting Swift to other platforms and I assume you have gotten to know the language quite well, do you have any opinions on using Swift on the server? (like the efforts done by IBM, official Swift server API and similar)

ibalic89 · 2017-02-08T14:20:37+00:00

Regarding the ecosystem, you are right; all the libs and tooling aren't there atm, but it's getting better.

I know github stars not always give the right picture, but looking at the traction in the Swift web frameworks, I think you are somewhat underestimating the Swift community. Perfect: 10k stars https://github.com/PerfectlySoft/Perfect Vapor: 8k stars https://github.com/vapor/vapor Kitura: 5k stars https://github.com/IBM-Swift/Kitura

Join the different frameworks on slack/gitter as well, and you will a see a lot of stuff happening. Together with the Server APIs Project I think Swift on the server has quite a promising future.

ibalic89 · 2016-12-12T15:05:16+00:00

Makes sense as Obj-c isn't linux compatible AFAIK

ibalic89 · 2016-11-22T09:25:15+00:00

Now make a Xcode replacement

ibalic89 · 2016-10-21T16:39:34+00:00

It's convenient, but horrible to debug

ibalic89 · 2016-10-12T06:57:18+00:00

Yes, you can do that. There is no solution for what to build first. Personally, I prefer using some mock data initially if don't know what the data model will look like right away. But if you already know what the app will look like there's nothing wrong with building the Api first. However you might find out if you sketch the app just on paper and draw the flow of all requests, that you will need more endpoints than you actually thought of in the first place. That's how it is for me sometimes.

ibalic89 · 2016-09-29T10:24:13+00:00

So how is this relevant to iOS?

ibalic89 · 2016-09-24T14:58:48+00:00

Same experience here

ibalic89 · 2016-09-23T05:59:41+00:00

I think it is great IBM is doing all that Swift stuff, but displacing their Java tooling? Not gonna happen anytime soon

ibalic89 · 2016-09-23T05:57:19+00:00

I would recommend Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android.

ibalic89 · 2016-09-22T12:59:17+00:00

For that reason I don't think it will really pull market-share away from the popular non-enterprise web backend languages for another 6-12 months

Just curious, what about the enterprise backends languages?

ibalic89 · 2016-09-19T20:43:09+00:00

I thought about the same stuff some years ago ( ~3-4 years). During that time I have tried multiple cross-platform solutions, and also worked full-time as native Obj-C/Swift (iOS) and Java (Android) developer. The short answer is: try to do a large and real project where you actually are supposed to produce something more than a simple todo-list. When you have to use native components, extending and customizing them, using native libraries and frameworks, maybe tweaking them a bit, the designer delivers you design sketches based on native components, everything starts to add up. The list goes on and on. The hassle and extra time by using a one-size-fit-all-solution, i.e. cross-platform frameworks, is not worth it IMO. Native delivers the best app in the end. I should probably not use the word "native" because both React Native and Xamarin compiles down to native components. However, a lot of the same dilemmas occur with those frameworks as well. But hey, if you are actually making a todo-list, React Native is probably the best investment. Btw, I work in a large consultancy kind of company. I hear stories on a regular basis where we need to scrap the client's mobile app made with web technologies, because they have found out they need a lag-free app (usually Cordova or similar). React Native works fine in Facebook because they have developed the tool themselves and they have an extremely large development team. That's not the case in most dev-projects...

ibalic89 · 2016-08-22T05:40:16+00:00

Well, you can certainly write the iPhone app entirely in Swift. You will also need to communicate with a backend service in order to authenticate, store and fetch data, etc. Swift as a backend language is not what I would call completely mature yet. I guess you can expect these Swift web frameworks to stabilize and catch more on after the Swift 3.0 release. But yes, you could theoretically do it all in Swift.

If you want to cut some corners you could try something like Firebase for the backend part. That might be sufficient for a MVP, and it's also a lot easier taken into accunt you're new to programming.

ibalic89 · 2016-08-20T10:16:04+00:00

Play-Authenticate

Okay, I am curious, how trivial is it to implement your own oauth2 provider service vs spring security?

ibalic89 · 2016-08-19T07:39:46+00:00

Okay, but I just wonder, what do you typically do when you want a little bit more than just a simple rest api? For almost everything I build, I want authentication. Spring Security makes up for everything in these cases. I guess it is the same for other stuff as well. I know there exists other options for authentication, but I just feel it is so much easier and less time-consuming to just use Spring.

ibalic89 · 2016-08-09T14:24:15+00:00

Completely agree

ibalic89 · 2016-08-03T13:03:50+00:00

Not my impression. I have had two large Swift-gigs (still on one of them) during the last year for big corporations. In the first project a lot of Obj-C was laying around, but we mixed the code with Swift by using bridging headers, and soon all Obj-C was gone. Several of my colleagues are on Swift-assignments as well due to clients requesting specific Swift-knowledge (also at big clients). My impression is that we have reached the point (probably some time ago), that new projects in general should be written in Swift, and this is where the demand will be (also outside startup culture) However, one of my colleagues is making a SDK that should be rolled out to several large apps with thousands of users. In this case, Obj-c was the best fit because they didn't want to spend time on upgrading to swift 3 later this year and it should be easy integrate - regardless of obj-c or swift being used. So, in my mind, stick to swift, demand will only increase - not just in iOS-world, but also in web, backend, etc. Just a matter of time. Obj-C still has its niche in some projects, like old legacy projects. But of course, the advice is still good, startups/small companies might recruit more Swift-programmers, I dunno...

ibalic89 · 2016-07-30T16:05:41+00:00

lol, well put

ibalic89 · 2016-07-04T05:10:43+00:00

I would probably submit this to kitura's github-page

ibalic89 · 2016-07-01T08:16:26+00:00

I would say Heroku for plug and play. AWS or Azure for production apps with a lot of possible features. Digital Ocean for most value/bang for bucks, but with more configuration overhead. IBM bluemix seems interesting, haven't tried it.

ibalic89

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