Swift should not be the future of iOS, and why TypeScript should. | Hacker News Reader

Swift should not be the future of iOS, and why TypeScript should.

medium.com

7 pointssbjs7 comments

I write Typescript for a living, and stink at swift - I don't understand where the author is coming from at all. Does Android support Typescript out of the box? Why shouldn't it as well?

I bundle thing into cordova and bang, what was once Typescript is now running sort of like a native app. You can make/get plugins for cordova that create wrappers for native methods, although I'm less familiar with that, but pretty sure you can expose things to the JS namespace using those techniques. Even when I'm running my typescript stuff in the browser, it's still getting transpiled before it runs there.

Not sure why Apple or Google would want to expose those methods via Typescript, don't know why Apple/Google would encourage Swift/Java developers to use Typescript when using Swift will create apps optimized for the hardware with fewer abstractions in the way.

Swift developers seem to like Swift, it ranks 6th in most loved language this year (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology).

I really hate that JS seems to be the go-to "alternative" for everything.

Swift is #6 on that list, TypeScript is #4. Swift is a completely new language which has a big overhead to learn from start to finish, but JavaScript has a lot of momentum and existing developers since it is already the lingua franca of the front end of the web. Swift is evolving slowly, but JavaScript is making very quick progress through TC39 during the same time span that Swift was alive. Swift has ambiguous and biased leadership but JavaScript has a well defined and established committee with members from major competitors who have common interest in the language succeeding. TypeScript inherits a lot of these benefits, as it intends to always keep up with the latest JavaScript standards and specification.

Swift is #6 on that list, TypeScript is #4.

This was meant to highlight that Swift developers don't seem unhappy with the language

Swift is evolving slowly, but JavaScript is making very quick progress through TC39 during the same time span that Swift was alive.

I'm not sure this is a bad thing

Swift has ambiguous and biased leadership but JavaScript has a well defined and established committee with members from major competitors who have common interest in the language succeeding.

I think this is a bit biased. Have you read Swift's Community Guidelines? https://swift.org/community/#communication

I don't really have a dog in this fight and would love some input from a Swift developer.

I still claim that introducing JavaScript is not the solution.

I did pick JavaScript as an opinionated suggestion. But really what I meant was that a garbage collected, simple OOP, high-level language is much better than a performance-based efficiency focused language when most of what you use it for has no need for efficiency or high performance.

I don’t get this article. Should Apple make an ahead of time compiler for Typescript and bridge it to Obj-C? What would be the benefit of using Typescript instead of Swift?

Give control of their primary dev language to others? Especially Microsoft? I can’t see Apple doing that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com