{"id":17211,"date":"2017-02-15T14:20:14","date_gmt":"2017-02-15T19:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=17211"},"modified":"2018-02-21T21:43:11","modified_gmt":"2018-02-22T02:43:11","slug":"swift-and-objective-c-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2017\/02\/15\/swift-and-objective-c-forever\/","title":{"rendered":"Swift and Objective-C Forever?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeff Johnson<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

When Swift became public in 2014, its creator Chris Lattner seemed to claim that Swift and Objective-C would coexist indefinitely.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The problem is that nobody believes this. And of course Lattner has now left Apple, so he won’t be there to take the criticism is his claim turns out to be false. The consensus among developers is that Apple will eventually deprecate Objective-C, and Swift will become the sole first class language for Cocoa app development.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

You only have to review the history of Apple developer relations to see the long string of deprecations, disappointments, suffering, and broken promises. Objective-C garbage collection, 64-bit Carbon, the Cocoa-Java bridge, Yellow Box for Windows, Dylan. Need I go on? I could go on. Apple evangelists will tell you that Swift is the best programming language ever and then turn around and tell you that we’ve always been at war with Swift.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The people who think Apple will deprecate Objective-C, how do they think Apple can handle it? Some people suggest that Apple will deprecate Objective-C externally, but they will continue Objective-C development internally and indefinitely. However, I think these people underestimate the problem. Given the amount of Objective-C code Apple has, and the constraints they’re working under, taking the slow road internally to a Swift future would be a very slow road indeed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I don’t see Apple dropping Swift. The technology seems to be sound<\/a>, and Apple has really put its reputation on the line in a way that it didn’t with the other canceled projects. Plus, unlike those, Swift already has massive adoption outside of Apple.<\/p>\n

That said, I expect that Objective-C, while not being deprecated, will decline in popularity the same way that Carbon—also officially a first-class coexister—did. I don’t think that Apple will maintain sample code parity for much longer.<\/p>\n

Johnson is right that there are many open questions about how Apple will manage this transition—if that’s what it is—both internally and externally. It will affect the OS itself, Apple’s apps, the public APIs, and Apple’s own staffing. It’s got to be difficult for Apple to hire and retain WebObjects programers for its internal services, and it could face similar issues, to a lesser extent, if developers continue to switch to Swift.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeff Johnson (Hacker News): When Swift became public in 2014, its creator Chris Lattner seemed to claim that Swift and Objective-C would coexist indefinitely. […] The problem is that nobody believes this. And of course Lattner has now left Apple, so he won’t be there to take the criticism is his claim turns out to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[38,69,296,937,31,30,54,71,901],"class_list":["post-17211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-apple","tag-cocoa","tag-dylan","tag-hiring","tag-ios","tag-mac","tag-objective-c","tag-programming","tag-swift-programming-language"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17211"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17224,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17211\/revisions\/17224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}