Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Grustaf 856 days ago
I started using Swift right away in 2014 and worked on several large projects written in Swift 2, 3, 4. Of the three or four large migrations I had to perform, the worst one still took less than a day - unless your Swift 4 project is enormous, you should be able to migrate it to Swift 5 before lunch time, the differences are really minimal.

Surely it's a good thing that a young language evolves, you can't improve without changing. And Apple were very clear about the fact that there would be breaking changes.

You can of course insist on using Objective C if you prefer it, but that closes the door to most of the new APIs that are being added by Apple, which seems like a very steep price to pay for the privilege of using a legacy language.

1 comments

Me, knowing my own code: "isn't easily replaceable without a significant rewrite"

You, knowing absolutely nothing about my code: "you should be able to migrate it to Swift 5 before lunch time"

(In this respect, yours is such a sterotypical HN comment. "I could build [whatever] over a weekend.")

Moreover, even if your baseless, overconfident assertion were true, it's now about 6 hours until lunch time, and I'd rather not waste that time on a free hobby project just to make the damn Swift compiler happy.

> that closes the door to most of the new APIs that are being added by Apple, which seems like a very steep price to pay

I haven't needed anything that requires Swift, so there's been no price paid. I'm doing great. No problems! Swift proponents seem to have to tell themselves that I'm suffering in some way by continuing to use Objective-C, but I'm not suffering at all.

Regardless of language, I usually avoid new Apple API, because it tends to be half-baked and buggy.

The source breaking differences between swift 4 and 5 are very few, and quite mechanical. Most of them should be adequately handled by the migration assistant, did you try that? If it’s open source, I’m happy to take a look.
I already know exactly what the issue is. I don't need your condescension.
I offered help, not condescension. In my experience migrating to swift 5 has been exceptionally painless, so if you find it onerous I was offering to assist you.
It's condescension because you continue to refuse to believe what I'm saying, and you keep insisting that something difficult is easy.

Moreover, if I needed help with a Swift issue, I would go to my many friends and associates in the Apple developer community. In fact, I've discussed the issue with some members of the Apple Swift engineering team, and I have an open bug report that Apple hasn't addressed. The very last person in the world I would consult about a programming issue is a random, condescending HN replier.

I don't doubt that you find it difficult, I am just saying that I never had any problems migrating to Swift 5. That's why I offered help, and because I am genuinely curious what it was that you found so overwhelming.