[cageface]

Swift is a nice language but its reliance on reference counting means you have to work a lot harder to avoid retain cycles than you do in a garbage collected language.

That might have been the right choice for Apple’s uses of Swift where GC pauses affect the user experience but for most other use cases it’s too much of a cognitive burden IMO.

[saagarjha]

Personally, I find that this only really comes up rarely. Most of the time strong references are fine.

[cageface]

My iOS code is loaded with weak/strong ref handling logic. It comes up all the time when using closures in UIKit.

[saagarjha]

UIKit is kind of annoying because it’s really not “idiomatic” Swift: it’s a wrapper around Objective-C (albeit, a very nice one) that happens to bring along with it a bunch of decisions that lead to having to deal with reference lifetimes.

[cageface]

That could be. I'll admit I haven't used Swift at all outside of coding Appkit/UIKit apps.

[dep_b]

iOS Swift is usually the front-end code which means that you're doing a lot of connections to data sources elsewhere. Non-blocking connections always need a weak/strong dance. If you're using Swift for logic most of that is gone.