[jb1991]

While it’s true that the language is really only useful on just Apple platforms, it is still quite an amazing language. I have professionally used about half a dozen languages over the last many years, written hundreds of thousands of lines each in all those languages, and swift is a true breath of fresh air. It checks all the boxes for me, very concise and elegant to write, yet very strictly statically typed. A nice upgrade to OO programming with use of protocols, with strong encouragement to use functional programming here and there as well. Runs reasonably fast, on par with Go or Java. Overall just really nice ergonomics. named parameters and a wide variety of other seemingly minor syntactical characteristics act as a meaningful upgrade to make the overall process of writing code much more enjoyable for me.

The fact that Apple provides all these incredible platform specific frameworks and libraries for graphics, audio, games, GPU kernel programming, and more, it’s just the icing.

[mpweiher]

> upgrade to OO programming with use of protocols

How exactly are protocols a Swift "upgrade" to OO programming? They were in Objective-C since the mid 90s, adopted by Java as interfaces, copied by C# etc.

Also, protocols in Swift have a huge performance downside, because they decided to have them work across structs and classes: if you use a protocol in a function argument, the compiler doesn't even know the size of the argument at compile time, so copying the arguments has to be dynamically dispatched unless the compiler can figure it out in an extra optimisation pass...that's not possible when doing separate compilation.

> Runs reasonably fast, on par with Go or Java.

A downgrade...particularly considering the epic compile times.

> named parameters

Also there since the 80s, in a less weird way.

https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/06/the-curious-case-of-swif...

> ...professionally used about half a dozen languages ...

What languages were those, if I may ask?

[jb1991]

Strange comment. I never said that Swift invented these language features; not sure what the relevance is that many of its features have existed for a long time and some other languages also offer them. Swift ties together a lot of features that in combination make it quite enjoyable to use. It's fine if you prefer other languages, there is certainly plenty of choice. Speaking of protocols, they offer some significant differences to protocols in ObjC which are very effective for writing saner and less bug-prone code, but I don't want to expound here on all aspects of the language. (there are many other simple features that make a big difference to the coding flow; computed properties, language-level optionals and the syntax surrounding their myriad uses, the list is quite long of good features to speed up safe, productive workflows)

Never had a problem with long compile times -- once you have your initial build, 90% of the time or more the incremental build process is very fast.

The languages I used for about 15 years were ObjC, C, C++, Clojure (and other langs before that). I find Swift to be a thoughtful blend of the key features of these four languages -- each of the things I like most about those langauges are in Swift, but it's the syntax in particular that I like most.

[mpweiher]

> I never said that Swift invented these language features;

Hmm...not sure how else to interpret "upgrade to OO programming with use of protocols" other than that there was an upgrade to OO, and that upgrade was with the use of protocols. Now it looks like you meant an upgrade of the way protocols are used in OO, but you won't say how they Swift's protocols actually constitute an upgrade.

OK. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Grustaf]

Protocols replace many uses of OO from objc, making code much easier to understand. In addition, swift protocols are much more powerful in almost every way.

[dwaite]

> How exactly are protocols a Swift "upgrade" to OO programming? They were in Objective-C since the mid 90s, adopted by Java as interfaces, copied by C# etc.

Typically you would write more protocol-oriented code - rather than using inheritance (which is mostly there for Objective-C compatibility) you define protocols and implement them for types.

This is a lot closer to traits in Rust than interfaces in Java. Among other things, a developer can define how a third party type implements a protocol they control, without subclassing or wrapping, as long as it does not require additional data.

[pjmlp]

So just like lots of Objective-C code, including the old NeXTSTEP Kits?

[jb1991]

Swift's protocols are an evolution of protocols in ObjC. They offer additional features to make them safer and easier to write.

[pjmlp]

I know both languages, did my learnings of Objective-C while porting code from NeXTSTEP into Windows 95, what additional features?

[jb1991]

I won’t teach Swift here, but Google is your friend. You can start by studying all the languages differences with regards to extending existing protocols, and how optional protocol conformance and methods are handled. Swift in many ways (not just with protocols) is like a fix for many headaches that objc provided in these areas. It’s partly why Apple encourages “protocol oriented” programming in swift over “object oriented” because of how rich the feature set is compared to objc.

[ohgodplsno]

>Runs reasonably fast, on par with Go or Java.

Having to deal with weakself, no reference cycles, very limited closures, having to deal with Xcode, no integration with any other IDE because Apple Apples, debatable generics, SPM, debatable cross platform abilities, fucking Tasks and Actors, SwiftUI being locked to versions of Swift, extremely limited community, few high quality open source libraries for something that only performs as well as Java is quite the hard sell.

For that price, you could also get Kotlin which fixes most of Java's problems and provides access to all the JVM as well as Kotlin/Native, with top tier DSL abilities and a really well thought out stdlib, coroutines, reified funs and much more.

[frizlab]

This comment is of very low quality. I agree with pretty much _nothing_ with it (and tbh most of it feels like trolling), but I’ll just comment on the thing where it’s obviously plainly wrong: no other IDE.

Swift has LSP integration, and has an official extension for VSCode, which works very well. They even have a blog post about it https://www.swift.org/blog/vscode-extension/

[thrwawy74]

It's Microsoft's Powershell, but for Apple's OS.