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by nicky0 3565 days ago
I don't want to have to ship apps containing the entire runtime. I'm waiting for the stable ABI.

As well, I'm happy to let the keen early-adopters be the guinea pigs. Xcode 8 only came out today. If you have production apps, it's madness to upgrade on day one. I'll wait a few weeks/months for the remaining bugs to shake out.

Don't get me wrong I'm very pro-Swift. But I'm also mindful of my time and sanity. Switching to a new language sure sounds fun, but not exactly productive (in the short term). When I do switch, I want everything to be rock solid, stable, all the tools, docs and everything.

But I have created a couple of toy projects in Swift, and I'm very excited to start using it properly in a year or two.
2 comments
untog 3565 days ago
I've only recently gotten into iOS development and the state of XCode amazes me. It's awful. Frequent crashes, disappearing tests, syntax highlight shutting down... it really makes me wish there were an alternative.
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Fargren 3565 days ago
You can buy AppCode. It's based on IntelliJ, so if you are used to taht it's great. But it's not perfect and I usually have both IDEs open when working on iOS (in aprticular, running and debugging are nicer from XCode. I write my code in AppCode and run it from XCode).
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jhbadger 3565 days ago
There's nothing stopping you from using one. The great thing about OSX is that you can get to the command line just like Linux and use Emacs or Vim. Or even GUI IDEs like Geany if that's what you want.
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armadsen 3565 days ago
A lot of this is worse for Swift than it is for Objective-C. Still, I do find it weird that such a mature product (roots going back decades, really) is still so shaky in fundamental areas. In many ways it has actually regressed since e.g. version 3.
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72deluxe 3551 days ago
I found versions 5 and 6 really buggy. 7 got better but I am waiting a while before going to 8. It is just too risky to upgrade so soon, given its years of buggy releases. It's poor.
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rsfinn 3558 days ago
"The entire runtime " is about 6 MB, and its inclusion in your app is completely transparent. (Admittedly I'm on the Mac, and there's undoubtedly more of an impact on iOS.)
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