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Comment by bouke | Hacker News Reader

Observing the launch of SwiftUI as a bystander (I'm not developing for any Apple platform), it seems that people are very excited about SwiftUI, but also get burned by it a lot. This is mostly Apple's fault by releasing this framework without any caveats. But the framework is more like an early alpha, not to be used in production. Tooling is not yet ready, documentation is not yet ready, heck even Swift –the language and compiler– aren't even ready yet. Apple should've put a big warning notice on any SwiftUI related website to set the correct expectations.

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I agree for the most part however I have put a simple app in the store with it and it works fine, it's usable for small apps. I had to wrap a few UIKit elements and a few other workarounds that I can't think of right now. But overall I'm happy they released it early and can benefit from the communities feedback and usage rather than building the whole thing in secret and releasing something finished that we might not even want. I hope that this is the beginning of them improving DX on their platforms as they have a lot of catching up to do to be competitive with other platforms.

Yeah, my sentiments exactly. I'm in the process of finishing a small app for a client, and it's been a blast. As you said, a number of workarounds are necessary due to the fact that UIKit is so rich, and SwiftUI is rather sparse at the moment.

However the fact that it's so easy to build new UI components, at this phase partly makes up for it.

Actually this a very common practice for Apple and well known among seasoned devs. Apple’s shiny new things don’t really belong in production apps until a few major versions in. In my decade of iOS development experience prevailing wisdom has been that nothing has ever worked until at least a few major versions in and don’t belong in production apps unless you really love rewriting your entire codebase.

Good rule of thumb is an application usually needs to support at least one prior major iOS version and SwiftUI is only available on 13. Don’t know current adoption numbers but I believe there is still a significant % of users still on 12.

Just don’t be surprised when SwiftUI apps require major refactoring to work on iOS 14.

I haven’t even touched SwiftUI yet as I’m orders of magnitude more productive with RxSwift and every single realworld-ish example implementation I’ve seen makes my eyes bleed.

Wouldn't Combine be the official competitor of RxSwift?

In the App Store that's called Sherlocking ;)

https://github.com/CombineCommunity/rxswift-to-combine-cheat...

Like I said, RxSwift is ready, SwiftUI/Combine isn't.

As someone who is a bit more involved in iOS development, I am also standing on the sidelines. Mainly because any apps that I am developing for, I can still keep on using NS Layout Anchors that work wonderfully. One of the biggest reasons I have decided not touch it is because of problems like these, until there is a v2 or v3 for swiftUI, its just not worth it to include it in any projects. (imho)

You are not developing for any Apple platform. And then later you state that the framework is more like an early alpha, not to be used in production.

On what basis do you make that rather bold statement?

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