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by abjKT26nO8 2169 days ago
On the other hand, Swift changes so frequently that book authors teaching the language can't keep up with Apple to write up-to-date books. By the time a book comes out covering version N, we're a couple months away from version N+1. In this situation I can't trust I will be able to buy a book, learn the language and become comfortable with it before there is a new version with major changes. It's a very moving ground.

As for performance, it would be cool if every single thing wasn't behind an atomic reference counter, making it slower than even garbage-collected Go: https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9670-safe_and_secure_drivers_in_... (the relevant part starts at 33:06).
2 comments
ralmidani 2169 days ago
Regarding language changes, I think this has improved quite a bit. I forget if stability was introduced in 4.x or 5.x, but code written today should be fine even when run through a new major version of the compiler. You can simply ignore new language features you aren't ready for until your codebase is due for a refactor.

Regarding ARC, you don't have to use reference types in Swift, and the community seems to agree that structs are more suitable than classes for most use cases (a SwiftUI app is made of structs that conform to certain protocols, and those structs can be initialized, copied, and "modified" with little overhead).

The cool thing about Swift is that structs can still have methods, computed properties, and custom initializers. So if you're coming from Python or Ruby or Java, or think OOP can help you organize your code, you don't have to throw away everything you've learned in order to be productive and write elegant code (and Swift brings a few new OOP tricks of its own).

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wool_gather 2169 days ago
> I forget if stability was introduced in 4.x or 5.x, but code written today should be fine...

They've always provided source compatibility modes in new releases of the compiler so you can delay making syntax changes to an existing codebase if you need to.

You're thinking of ABI stability, which is in place as of Swift 5, and doesn't have anything to do with what parent is talking about.

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saagarjha 2169 days ago
For some time; at some point newer compilers will drop support for older versions.
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raydev 2169 days ago
> Swift changes so frequently that book authors teaching the language can't keep up

This hasn't been true for a couple years.

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