Hacker News Reader

Comment by dep_b | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Apple is the only one left that uses a strongly typed pre-compiled native programming language. It really isn't hard to use Swift compared to other programming languages. And it's a really nice to use, safe and if you want it to be also a language that allows you to write really fast algorithms.

View on HN

Dart is strongly typed and pre-compiled, at least when packaged. It can run in interpreted mode in development for live/hot reload: a major advantage over Swift. Flutter also provides a first class Reactive UI story: something sorely lacking in native iOS (or Mac) development.

PS Java (or Kotlin) are AOT compiled in all recent versions of Android.

> Dart is strongly typed and pre-compiled, at least when packaged. It can run in interpreted mode in development for live/hot reload: a major advantage over Swift.

Ah, that's how they do it. That's neat! But the language still has to deal with JavaScript compatibility.

> PS Java (or Kotlin) are AOT compiled in all recent versions of Android.

But it's still a mess to call native code. And still has Java garbage collection.

Microsoft supports C++ and pre-compiled C# for Windows UI development too.

As a UI dev, I'd much prefer the hot-reloading that you get from Flutter, React Native, and web UI development though. But I still care about battery life and global warming so it can be hard to justify the flashy new stuff for most the UI development I do, which is mostly just list views.

I'm also weary of the post-mortem debugging experience for these higher level frameworks. C++ is nice for this given that usually the OS and UI frameworks are implemented in it too, at least on Windows.

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com