[wsc981]

I find 'simple' languages charming. Hence, I still like Objective-C. I also like Lua a lot.

I liked Swift when I tried it a couple of years ago, but it seems overloaded with features these days. I haven't tried Swift UI yet, but I did think the Objective-C approach with xibs, struts and such worked fine.

[wingerlang]

There is probably around a decade-long leap between XIB and SwiftUI. XIB files are only found in legacy code nowadays. It might have worked fine in smaller projects, but I think there are good reasons why it was left behind.

In my experience, most XIB files were either so small and easy that it was simply easier to replicate it in ten lines of code. Or so giant an impenetrable that it took thousands of lines of code to replicate it with, and at that point most people prefer to work with code over a dense XIB file.

[rcruzeiro]

xibs were an absolute nightmare if you worked with a team. Even in the Objective-C days a lot of developers were sticking with programatic layout to avoid xibs. Google even had this mandated in their Objective-C style guide.

[cosmic_cheese]

On iOS, code-only UIKit with bits of SwiftUI interspersed for simple components (think collection view cells) is definitely the way to go. UIKit is well equipped to be written that way (unlike Android Framework, which practically forces use of XML layouts in many cases).

For Mac dev, AppKit is still fairly heavily weighted towards use of XIBs, but it’s not nearly as much of an issue there because on average each individual XIB isn’t as overloaded with controls because the UI is more split up.

[rcruzeiro]

I’ve also had a good experience using SwiftUI with hosting confia for my cells. I am now at a point where I mostly use SwiftUI with just the occasional fallback to programmatic UIKit for the bits that are not quite there yet.

[saagarjha]

FWIW Android's XML layout is actually pleasant to use (though Jetpack Compose is also quite good).

[cosmic_cheese]

My experience with Android XML is mixed, but that might actually be more of an Android Studio problem. I did enjoy being able to reasonably hand edit the files, which isn’t practical with XIBs, and so naturally git conflicts aren’t as hairy.

I definitely prefer Compose these days though.

[saagarjha]

Google's style guide is usually not a great reference if you want to write a language that they didn't make. But yes, XIBs kind of suck.