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Comment by ashton314 | Hacker News Reader

Looks like a solid update on first glance. I nearly tore my hair out last month building a SwiftUI app. The error messages were terrible—I had never seen such poor error messages. I'm so glad they're addressing that.

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Swift is one of my favorite languages. Until I hit a fucking error. Then I just want to be done with it.

The errors are so bad that it trains me to never write more than a few lines at a time without compiling/running it.

The runtime errors can be comically bad, bucking you into a screen of assembly for the simplest of mistakes.

Perhaps you have debug symbols disabled?

How do they compare to cpp template errors?

Less verbose, and usually (but not always) more understandable. I think it’s probably similar to what C++ errors will be with concepts.

No kidding. I really like swiftui, the declarative model is great and it’s so much less of a pain than React-native, but trying to decipher the error messages for it while I was learning swift was comically bad at times.

I'm curious about the major pains with React-native you experienced. Is it because of the toolchain for RN? or some specific scenario?

As a contributor to RN and someone who loves SwiftUI just as much: it’s mostly the toolchain. You have an unbelievably vertically integrated framework with SwiftUI.

Do you think SwiftUI is still too experimental to build out a production-ready app? I'm a RN dev leading the app development at our startup, but every time I check on SwiftUI I LOVE what I see. Sadly it looks like the final results are mostly tech demos rather than fully integrated apps.

Thinking maybe we have to wait for a behemoth's adoption (like AirBnB & React Native) to take the ecosystem to the next level.

I would say it just depends, which I know isn't satisfying as an answer. I shipped an app named Eggy which is all SwiftUI- but it isn't super complex exactly. There are still plenty of simple problems that are hard to get around. But you can definitely use it to replace pieces of an app.

I also shipped an app for a client called Droplii. I definitely believe you can use it for production level apps. Productivity is through the roof. There are just a few small quirks, but I believe the pros out weigh the cons here.

I've shipped a small app in it and am collaborating on another currently. If you're looking to use it on your team I'd wait for this years online WWDC, see whats announced and evaluate from there.

Sibling comment here mostly covered it, toolchain is kind of all over the place and build times are way faster with swiftui on my 2015 MacBook.

Also with Combine and associated bits there is a lot less boilerplate around state that doesn’t have to be written.

Also the disk space for the js ecosystem is beyond crazy and really bothers me.

Compared to native development the toolchain and dependencies are out of control and I'm unsure how it can really be improved, Expo does a decent job of abstracting some of it but you lose so much from the managed workflow that it makes me question the purpose of building a native app at all. I think the real threat that PWAs bring is to frameworks like React Native and Cordova rather than fully native apps which will likely always have specific use cases.

I've learned you wait a couple of years before you start trying to use new major apple developer tech. Same thing with swift, it was better to wait until swift 3 or 4 before adopting it.

Yeah, also for the DSL's you build yourself with the new 5.1 features, really bad error messages. If that would get better in 5.2, it would help a lot.

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