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by jshier 893 days ago
> That's a mult-year project in its very early stages, yet we're already almost 10 years into Swift (more than 10 years of Swift internally to Apple).

It has already shipped, replacing parts of Foundation in the 2023 OS versions. It continues to grow, and it's a rewrite, so it certainly proves your assertion wrong.

My other points were a bit hyperbolic. Feel free the replace "all" with "the vast majority of". Apple obviously still writes Obj-C in their existing Obj-C frameworks, and doesn't arbitrarily rewrite into Swift, but their internal barriers to use Swift are now almost entirely gone. And I can't think of an entirely new framework that wasn't Swift-only recently.

1 comments

> It continues to grow, and it's a rewrite, so it certainly proves your assertion wrong.

Which assertion was wrong? I was paraphrasing from the project page itself:

"It is in its early stages with many features still to be implemented." https://github.com/apple/swift-foundation

> Which assertion was wrong?

Your original assertion that Apple wasn't rewriting anything.

> Your original assertion that Apple wasn't rewriting anything.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I made no such assertion.

Perhaps you're confusing me and "toyg"?

Ah true. Not sure why you replied then. Your point about Foundation was meaningless and the others just nits. Do you have an actual point to make?
> Your point about Foundation was meaningless and the others just nits. Do you have an actual point to make?

My point, as always, is the truth. You said two false things, which you subsequently admitted were hyperbole. Truth is valuable in itself, and more important than "points", i.e., arguments or motives.

If I were to make a point, though, it's that Objective-C still has a very long life ahead of it, and its complete replacement, if that ever occurs, will be an arduous process, given the amount of extant Objective-C code in the operating systems and first-party apps (not to mention third-party apps). It's not just Objective-C either: C++ is also used quite a bit in the OS. Think of WebKit, for example.

You're not going to be able to hire many people with Objective-C experience nowadays. Engineers with 7 years of experience just writing iOS apps will very likely will have only used Swift in their work experience. I work with 2 of them now.