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Comment by matt2000 | Hacker News Reader

matt2000

I agree with you. When Swift was introduced it was billed as a modern replacement for ObjC that was easier to learn, even a good choice as a language for learning to program. I'm not sure it was ever that, but it sure isn't now. I just got back into a project written in Swift 3 and had to change a bunch of stuff to get it to work in Swift 5. Why? I keep hearing the language is going to be stable "soon" but that doesn't appear to be happening.

Swift appears to be a language for the captive audience of iOS devs, who are able to keep up if that's all they're doing. I don't really see it being adopted anywhere else.

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To be fair, the pace of source breaking changes has slowed down considerably. From Swift 1 to Swift 3 there were many breaking changes between versions, and automated migration was very necessary. Between 3 and 4 there were some changes, and between 4 and 5 almost no source breaking changes.

I think it's actually fair for a new language to take a somewhat cavalier approach to backward compatibility. I would rather not be stuck with all the naive mistakes made in the first version of a language just to avoid migration.

> I just got back into a project written in Swift 3 and had to change a bunch of stuff to get it to work in Swift 5. Why? I keep hearing the language is going to be stable "soon" but that doesn't appear to be happening.

Swift 3 was released in 2016. Swift is ABI / source / module stable now, but that doesn't make it retroactively stable with a version released four years ago.

For what it's worth, source stability is definitely a much firmer constraint now in the minds of the core team: https://forums.swift.org/t/principles-for-trailing-closure-e...

Of course this comes with its own concerns, as you can see from that thread.

> I keep hearing the language is going to be stable "soon"

I think you may be referring to the promises of ABI stability? They kept promising that "soon" starting around Swift 3 (IIRC) and kicking the can down the road for a while there, but it is stable now on Apple's OSes. But I don't recall seeing promises of source stability back then; they were pretty open about the fact that the language was still evolving.

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