[JimDabell]

> The new parts in macOS that are written in Swift seem to be mostly inferior to the parts they replaced (see for instance the new settings windows written in SwiftUI, which UX wise is a joke compared to the old one

Swift is a programming language. SwiftUI is a UI framework. The programming language doesn’t dictate UX. The new Settings application doesn’t have worse UX because of its programming language.

> If Swift is so much better than ObjC, then we should start seeing improvements as users, but that doesn't seem to happen, instead things are getting worse in new OS versions. Why is that?

Because Apple are institutionally incapable of writing software at a sustainable pace and things gradually get worse and worse until somebody high up enough at Apple gets fed up and halts development to catch up with all the quality issues. This isn’t anything new to Swift; they took two years off from feature development to release Snow Leopard with “zero new features” because things had gotten too bad, which happened years before Swift. They are just far enough along in the current cycle that these problems are mounting up again.

[lapcat]

> they took two years off from feature development to release Snow Leopard with “zero new features” because things had gotten too bad

This is not an accurate characterization of Snow Leopard. See "The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard": https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/11/5.html See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard

There were many significant changes to the underlying technologies of Snow Leopard. Moreover, Snow Leopard was not, despite the common misconception, a "bug fix release". Mac OS X 10.6.0 was vastly buggier than Mac OS X 10.5.8.

[flohofwoe]

I was also (somewhat indirectly) responding to the claim in the parent.

> The tradeoff is that the app runs faster, looks better, works better.

I haven't noticed any of that so far in new macOS versions, and it is indeed not something where the programming language should matter at all.

[incrudible]

> Swift is a programming language. SwiftUI is a UI framework. The programming language doesn’t dictate UX. The new Settings application doesn’t have worse UX because of its programming language.

Swift the language strongly informed SwiftUI, which in turn strongly informed the applications written in it. The path of least resistance defines the most likely implementation. If I have to go the extra mile to do something, I probably will not, so worse UX (by some metric) is a direct consequence of that constraint.

[fnfjfk]

There’s not really anything wrong with the SwiftUI API. The implementation is just terrible, especially on macOS.

Jetpack Compose is a similar API on Android, except the implementation is good, so apps using it are good.

[jb1991]

And the vice-versa... features were added to Swift the language to make certain SwiftUI syntax possible.