Friday, November 21, 2014

Swift Retrospective

Ash Furrow:

We discovered, as I mentioned earlier, that Swift just isn’t ready for primetime yet. I want it to be, but it was probably a mistake to write the app in Swift. By our projections, it took us about four times longer than we had anticipated to complete the project (in terms of person-hours worked). A lot of that is admittedly due to our own faulty estimates, but a lot more of it is attributable to Swift’s immaturity. In future projects, we’re going to be more mindful about estimation.

[…]

So we’re pretty much stuck with Swift, as much as you can be “stuck” with a totally awesome language that just needs some more time to have a mature ecosystem of tools. Swift does, after all, address most of my concerns with Objective-C. It has a lot of features that made developing Eidolon a joy. I’m impressed with what Apple’s made so far, but I’m eagerly waiting for Xcode 6.2 and beyond.

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Still seems a much better proposition than integrating the Objective-C object model in the D compiler, and then making a D plugin for Xcode, so you can write your Cocoa app in D. I tried that. It was interesting for a while.

As of Xcode 6.1.1 Swift compiler and editor is _much_ better.

I also think that big issue that those guys had was using reactiveswift and the like, libraries that require much more time to mature

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