Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by steve1977 2 hours ago
I think the problem with SwiftUI in a way was (or is) that Cocoa was so good. And, at least IMHO, it didn't need replacing, just improving.

But I feel like Apple wanted to appeal to young web devs and tried to offer something more similar to what these are used to.
2 comments
monster_truck 2 hours ago
Totally agreed. I kind of figured things were going to get shitty when the guy who made autolayout got hounded on so hard that he left.

I sure hope they can figure out a way through. Whatever it is, SwiftUI isn't it.

link
rudedogg 2 hours ago
> Whatever it is, SwiftUI isn't it.

I think this opinion is heavily shared by Swift developers now, but the messaging every WWDC is always "Swift and SwiftUI is the best way to build apps for Apple Platforms", etc.. If you have to keep telling everyone what they don't believe is true, it's a sign there's a problem.

It feels like someone with a lot of organizational power is disconnected from the pulse of the community. SwiftUI is undeniably clean in a lot of ways, it presents beautifully and fits on slides well, but that matters less and less, and this all wasn't really working out even before LLMs disrupted things.

link
steve1977 1 hour ago
Well the problem now is Apple would need to admit they made a mistake. And Apple does not make mistakes.
link
refulgentis 2 hours ago
It’s a seductive idea, but it displaces who is responsible for the poor framework development onto users of the framework.

It’s easy to say they were just trying to be trendy and thus the real flaw was the trend is bad and the fault of worse devs than us (the young web devs mentioned)

The thing that obviates that is the trendy stuff works, yet, SwiftUI doesn’t.

(source: I wrote ObjC/Cocoa as early as 2006, and switched to Flutter as my primary dev kit some years ago: it simply doesn’t have the performance issues mentioned.)

link