Objective-Swift
Now, these aren’t really problems with Swift — they’re problems with pure Swift. […] Given that, I made the pragmatic decision to start using @objc protocols, classes, and collection types where those things make sense, where Swift fought against my design.
And suddenly the language is a joy to use. It’s like Objective-C but with type inference, no .h files, fewer imports, shorter syntax — and I get the things I was missing.
This is my current approach as well. Swift has a lot to offer just as a better Objective-C. I’m not enamored with generics, and protocols seem like a good idea that in practice is currently too much of a pain to use. Likewise, the standard library is still in flux and not fully understood, whereas Foundation is stable and a known quantity. Foundation is great. Why not keep using it?
It’s also my hunch that by staying closer to the Objective-C world you are more likely to avoid bugs and confusing error messages from the Swift compiler. And you can somewhat avoid painting yourself into a corner because any code should be relatively easy to port back to Objective-C, if necessary. It’s not possible to subclass a Swift class from Objective-C, though—even if it inherits from NSObject—so hopefully you won’t run into any problems with a leaf class.
Update (2015-08-14): Joe Groff:
ObjC and the ObjC runtime also aren’t going away. Using @objc for things still we suck at natively is good and encouraged.
My intuition says they’ll naturally wither like Carbon did. And we won’t mind.
But it’s nice to hear there aren’t plans to artificially axe ObjC.
3 Comments RSS · Twitter
Other problem is separation is done
for Open Source reasons.
Foundation and even ObjC runtime won't be open sourced
but Swift and its standard library will be
and they cannot contain anything from the past and standalone.
This means Standard Library will quick need stuff the C lib, C++ STD
in order to be useful for non Apple system.
What is Apple incentive to pollute it with junk it doesn't want to support in its
own system.
Apple does want to replace C and C++ but doesn't really want to help the industry
do that.
Most Apple employees are too over worked to even dream any vision that is concrete.
@dr.one Objc runtime is and has always been open source. Foundation isn't, but it is built on CF and CFLite also is. In addition, there are 2-4 open source Foundations out there, you don't need Apple's.
@Marcel I thought Apple was moving Foundation away from CF, though it’s true that there are alternatives.
