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by thelastidiot 2816 days ago
A bit useless. Are they using it in the top ten (mail, web, cal, clock, etc.)? How much of Swift compared to ObjC code? Those are the real answers I would expect to read in your article.
2 comments

And all those answers are IN the article.

>Are they using it in the top ten (mail, web, cal, clock, etc.)?

No.

>How much of Swift compared to ObjC code?

Much less.

It makes sense too. You don't rewrite perfectly good programs in a new language just for the fun of it.

>perfectly good programs

The Holy Grail of software engineering

it is indeed used in a few top 10 apps
Apps that predate Swift will likely contain little to no Swift. There is no good reason for it to be otherwise.
I rewrote a commerical app to Swift and saw a lot of advantages. The rewrite uncovered a number of bugs due to the stricter type checking, and general strictness (no unitialized variables e.g).

It also allowed us to get more people involved in development. People new to apple development found Objective-C to be a bigger barrier. Odd syntax and a bit old fashion.

Mind you I quite liked Objective-C. But it seems a bit pointless when you got Swift.

dock is one of the oldest apps on macOS, was rewritten in swift when it was announced.