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Comment by matt2000 | Hacker News Reader

matt2000

I appreciate the author putting this post together. I am, however, having trouble squaring the overall positive tone of the piece with what seem like multiple show stopping problems. The bottom line I am taking away from this is you might not be able to ship your app at all if you use SwiftUI. Am I being too harsh? Or does that seem accurate?

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I started building a side project in Swift/SwiftUI for the first time a few months back. It has quite simply been the most painful development experience to date (I've been a professional developer 16 years - front/back/many languages). I've wasted a huge number of days trying to get the damn thing to build reliably, or getting preview to work without hanging the machine or any number of random issues that generally go away if you just rebuild the project enough times... On a side project it's been a real motivation killer, instead of building my app I spend my time trawling through bug reports and trying to find workarounds for broken features. At this point I'm considering starting from scratch with Flutter. /rant

You should, it was the best decision I ever made - comfort and simplicity of writing ObjC (Dart) with an _amazing_ UI toolkit (that hopefully SwiftUI will eventually be if/when it grows up)

Flutter has been the most fun I've had writing mobile apps in a long time. Generally just works and with just a bit more effort you can even get the desktop version of your app running. Definitely recommend for a fun side project.

I’ve tried Flutter a few times and it doesn’t stick. Part of my issue is finding the stock cupertino widgets to look kinda off and the material design widgets to look out of place on iOS. Maybe Flutter is great for when you have a custom design to implement or you’re primarily targeting Android? I also strongly prefer Swift/Kotlin to Dart but I’m sure I’d get used to it.

The author and I have both been in the iOS community for over a decade. We likely have similar opinions that SwiftUI is interesting but still in incubation phase, and that the majority of SwiftUI's focus has been iOS support.

So a post showing how v2 of SwiftUI's limitations is a useful read because it's a reminder that it has more to go on the Mac - I expected that, and I bet he did. So it's positive in the sense that he wasn't disappointed, but that it met the (admittedly low) expectations of the author

The comments mainly relate to the Mac OS implementation, which is clearly very early and not fit for production. As he points out the iOS version is more stable. The company I work for are already shipping a SwiftUI iOS app, and plan another one.

I've been using SwiftUI for design and prototyping since release on iOS, to the point where it's faster for me to prototype on SwiftUI rather than Figma or Sketch. Particularly with animations and overall experience.

The problem for new people is the error reporting is still pretty bad, and it gets flakey if your views are too big. The key is to keep views small and compose them. It's also hard moving to a declarative model for UIKit devs who haven't done React.

I read it as sarcasm...

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