Hacker News Reader

Comment by NathanFlurry | Hacker News Reader

One has structures, ARC, proper extensions, good protocols/interfaces, flexible enums, and runs natively. The other one doesn't. I think I'll choose the former.

View on HN

One has a top-notch IDE from a top-notch IDE vendor. The other has XCode.

Also, ARC aside, for the 3-4 items you mentioned, either Kotlin also also has them, or has just as good alternatives. And none of those are life-changing. ARC vs a good GC is just a different tradeoff (no cycle detection vs pauses, etc).

I'm sure you can find some things where Swift is better at, and others where Kotlin is. But not that many to proclare one or the other the definite winner, and surely not a major one.

Sure thing...

When will Jetbrain have a decent interface builder?

Decent instrumentation?

Decent documentation viewer?

Can you get an object graph with JetBrains?

Xcode isn't perfect, but it's way better than JetBrains.

Just because one has one feature that one doesn't have, doesn't mean that Xcode beats JetBrain's IDE all day.

Yes, yes, and yes, plus Jetbrain IDEs have much superior code assistance and navigation compared to Xcode. Xcode is clearly worse than Visual Studio, JetBrains, Eclipse, and many other IDEs I've used over the past 20 years in the industry when it comes to code navigation, refactoring, and basic editing. Xcode does only one thing well and that's interface builder, but if you were writing a backend application with no UI would you choose Xcode? I'd rank it lower than emacs and vim for editing tasks.

Otoh, my colleagues were surprised seeing easy and good-looking two-panel diff and blame right in Xcode. Analyzis build (one that shows blue arrows for how we can get into trouble) was surprise too. It seems that preference depends on use cases and two products can differ in different ways, not only as superior vs. regular.

I never did anything in VS though, cause its interface always turned me 180 after first run. And I can write Makefile and .gvimrc from scratch much faster than it installs itself.

> Xcode isn't perfect, but it's way better than JetBrains.

O_o Are you kidding me?

People whinge all the time about jetbrains subscriptions, but I've literally never spoken to someone who's actually used their products and think that the alternative editors available (visual studio, xcode, etc) are actually better.

There are some features like UI designers that you can't do without, but it's been a long time since I met anyone who actually liked xcode.

Swift has Xcode and Jetbrains. There's no need to have an editor war.

https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/

I tried AppCode to write in objc on mac and it felt way less transparent and smooth than Xcode. Idk if Xcode is missing some features, but all my real issues probably exist in different planes. My Xcode inconvenience points are: case-insensitive completion sometimes gets in my way, as it is with single lettered variables; it is easy to break constraints for non-trivial xib. I can live with both. What is it for you, in short?

Unless very recently XCode also crashed like crazy. So there's that.

I've attempted to use IntelliJ for javascript/typescript (React, Node.js) and Elixir. I've found myself continually going back to VSCode or other editors. Especially for the front-end ecosystem, VSCode's intellisense, syntax highlighting and plugin support blows everyone else out of water IMO.

I use IntelliJ/Android Studio for Java, and that's about it.

Refactoring is a dream with JetBrains. But it is very language dependent, with Java having most support. Haven't used Kotlin in Intellij so I don't know how well Kotlin is supported, though I imagine rather well given that it their own language.

I use PyCharm and refactoring works pretty well there too. Also I really like having an IDE that runs and presents itself just the same on all big three platforms, since I'm always hopping between computers.

Nobody should be using IB at all for iOS development. Ever.

Except for people laying out the views. Visual things deserve a visual editor. Writing code to lay out views is the absolute worst.

ARC does have a pauses when huge graph is being destroyed. Advantage of ARC is that its pauses are predictable.

I'll take good IDE support over any of the things you mention above. Seeing how my colleagues refactor in XCode makes me cringe every time... Kotlin support in IntelliJ is almost as good as Java.

Yet they could use AppCode by JetBrains if they wanted.

Kotlin Native ships with an ARC. But depending on the application ARC can be a disadvantage since it can't automatically handle reference cycles like Kotlin on the JVM can.

> [Kotlin Native] features automatic reference counting with a cycle collector on top, but what the final memory management solution(s) will look like is unknown at this point.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2017/04/kotlinnative-tech-...

So it's not ARC (in the Swift sense), it's just RC + cycle breaker.

What do you mean by "just"? ARC is just RC done by the compiler. Kotlin Native is ARC + cycle collector.

Is the Native AOT compiled, or just a different byte code VM? I assume the latter?

The Kotlin/Native compiler produces standalone executables that can run without any virtual machine.

> https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2017/04/kotlinnative-tech-...

Nice...if only a good REPL, I could finally leave Python.

They're not really in direct competition. Try writing an Android app in Swift, or an iOS app in Kotlin. Technically possibly either way, but one's definitely more suited than the other for each purpose.

That's more about APIs and vendor support than language tbf.

As chance might have it, the Swift documentation has a section on programming for Android: https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/master/docs/Android.md

And RoboVM has an article on using Kotlin for iOS development: https://robovm.com/kotlin-for-cross-platform-mobile-app-deve...

Which one is easier? I need to write some cross-platform native code for my React Native app, and I'm having a really hard time deciding on the language.

I honestly didn't know that I could use either Kotlin OR Swift for both platforms. But which would be easier to get running on Windows? I also need to write a version that works on the web, and I've heard that Kotlin can transpile to JS. So that's pretty amazing if that works.

Otherwise I was considering C, C++, or Rust.

I've done both iOS and Android and I'll take Java + Kotlin + Android Studio over the iOS stack any day.

Have you tried AppCode?

Yes, I know about Kotlin Native, but it's not quite there yet.

Unfortunately, you don't really get to make the decision by itself. You kinda have to go with which platform am I building on first.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com