[paperplatter]

Swift is the only language where I've had to fight the compiler to do its job. In earlier versions like 1.x and 2.x, it would often segfault. By 3.x it was still really slow to build. I regretted moving a project off ObjC back then.

I thought maybe that was all fixed by now, but guess not?

[cageface]

On paper Swift has a lot going for it. In practice it's easily the worst devx out of the modern languages. And SwiftUI is still so full of bugs and performance pitfalls I'm actually quite pessimistic about the future of native apps on Apple platforms.

[seec]

To be honest, the way they are damaging their brand/products/OS just to make a bit more money is enough to be pessimistic about Apple.

But it's very true that the state of the language can be felt in their native apps, that tend to suck pretty bad recently. I still can't get over the nightmare that is the split up of iTunes; at least we knew that it was clunky because of old age, the new stuff is just bad.

[paperplatter]

Yeah there's a reason people go to all that effort with React Native to avoid writing Swift code or dealing with Apple's UI frameworks, and it's actually a reasonable approach for the majority of apps.

[cageface]

My main app is a cross platform Flutter app. I've considered rewriting it in Swift because most of my users are on macOS or iOS but all the prototypes I've written are actually slower even after extensive performance work and the development experience makes me want to tear my hair out.

[felideon]

Ironic, given Flutter's infamy regarding performance (jank).

[paperplatter]

I'm actually surprised at this because while UIKit is hard to use, at least it's fast. Though I remember the concurrency model being confusing, so you could accidentally block your UI thread.

[cageface]

UIKit is pretty fast although a major step down in dev velocity.

AppKit on the other hand seems to be pretty intrinsically slow and the controls are looking increasingly dated.

[cageface]

Yeah I worried about that going in too but in fact I've found it much easier to get good performance with Flutter than SwiftUI, especially for large collection views and especially on the mac.

The work the Flutter team did on Impeller seems to have paid off.

[fingerlocks]

You should try to implement the iOS photos.app in flutter and see how that goes. This requires scrolling through gigabytes of photos as fast as your finger can swipe without a single hint of slowdown or a loading spinner. And it’s been that fast since.. iOS 7?

Yeah it’s not the language or the SDK that’s slow. Rather it’s inexperienced, lazy, or overworked developers that can’t/won’t write performant software.

[pjmlp]

People go to React Native to stay on their cozy Web skills, it is exactly the same if we would be talking about Microsoft and Google platforms.

[paperplatter]

I started using RN when I had 0 web skills and didn't know JS. Everything from making a simple button to hooking up the model was easier to me in RN from day 1 than the native iOS way that I'd been using for years.

[pjmlp]

As someone that unfortunately has to deal with React ecosystem, and knows reasonably well native programming across Apple, Google and Microsoft ecosystems, I have some hard time believing that, but might be a knowledge issue.

[riesinger]

The Google ecosystem? Isn’t that also just Web-based?

[ameliaquining]

I mean, I figure the more compelling reason to do that is so you can also ship an Android app without writing everything twice.

[paperplatter]

Sorta, but it's not as easy as they make it sound. And people will use RN even for iPhone-first stuff.

[evilfred]

except for the thousand times you end up having to dip down into native components

[nwienert]

I'd say most of the time it's a handful of times or less. Uniswap is a good example of a large OSS three-platform app that shares almost all the code, uses very few native dependencies, and has great UX. I maybe biased since I worked there and made the UI framework they use, though.

https://github.com/uniswap/interface

[fingerlocks]

I have made a lucrative career by porting fragile, slow, bug-ridden react-naive disasters to native code bases. There is a lot of demand for this from startups that took the cross-platform shortcut and the MVP became the product.

[nsonha]

Like you dont have to know native components anyway?

In one way you centralise as much logic as you can and are encouraged to write clean code that doen't depend on platfrom quirks. In the other way you... give up and just do whatever.

I can see how some devs find it hard to not give up and just write the same logic in multiple languages, great job security!

[astrange]

I can think of a few others where you have to do that; most of them are the kind of languages whose fans say they're impossible to write bugs in.

[cageface]

Rust is hard but I've never had the compiler just throw up its hands and tell me it's up to me to figure out what's wrong.

[astrange]

That's not the one I was thinking of.

https://anthony.noided.media/blog/haskell/programming/2020/0...

Something like Idris or Coq would have even more complex messages, though I don't have an example on hand.

[cageface]

Ok but these are mainly academic research languages. Swift has the backing of the most valuable company in the world and is what they're pushing as the right way to develop for their platform.

[astrange]

Haskell is definitely a real industrial language!

Many of the other languages in the formally verified/dependent type space are academic, but there's government interest in things like Ada too because they don't want their planes to crash. Couldn't say how good its error messages are though.

[paperplatter]

I've seriously used Erlang for a while, and Haskell looks kinda similar. Ingenious ideas there, cool features, but in the end it's cumbersome to use. So I can see why these are niche and wouldn't consider them next to big ones like Swift or C++.

[paperplatter]

If Rust is one, yeah I have to fight that compiler but it's because it's doing its job and not letting me do invalid things. Not because the compiler has some feature "not yet implemented" or has bugs.

[paperplatter]

Also, is anyone familiar with the weirdness with tuples in Swift? All I remember is they never worked the way I expected, and for some reason something in our code specifically worked for tuples up to size 5.

[plorkyeran]

Swift only got variadic generics fairly recently, and before that you couldn’t write code which was generic over tuple size. Instead you had to codegen versions for each size of tuple you needed to support.

[paperplatter]

I think that was it. There was also something about tuples inside of dictionaries that Swift 1 or 2's compiler segfaulted on.