I don't think Apple developers have the experience to see how far behind SwiftUI is and how little chance there is of them catching up, and I don't think non-Apple developers have the experience to see there's very little 'special' to ObjC or Swift.
I’d agree at least that platform-specific developers can often keep themselves far too isolated. They really should be making an effort to work cross-platform as much as possible, because learning about the different patterns and techniques used in different environments is an incredible force multiplier.
Such as?
In any case, I'd assume those miles are only gained on iOS where Apple has gimped the newer web APIs.
Picking some features I like entirely at random: libdispatch, Core Data, comprehensive accessibility support, SpriteKit, Core Video, ARKit… basically, there are lot of powerful and reasonably consistent APIs (with good performance) that really make a bunch of development much more tractable. Some of these can be replicated on the web platform; others can't.
In any case, I'd assume those miles are only gained on iOS where Apple has gimped the newer web APIs.
I'm sure you appreciate why that kind of attitude is a bit silly and serves to demonstrate the exact effect I was initially talking about.
The rest looks like it's focused on graphics/stuff you wouldn't do on the web anyway - yes, the fact it's impossible on the web _means by definition Apple is miles ahead_, but claiming Apple is overall miles ahead on dev experience because of AR and video bitstream manipulation APIs is a bit blinkered, given very few developers get to use those APIs.
Those are not features. Those are names of developer libraries.
What do you think they can do that's so much better?
> I'm sure you appreciate why that kind of attitude is a bit silly...
Apple clearly nerfs the web on iOS and there's nothing silly about acknowledging that. It's actually kinda silly pretending that they don't xD
> and serves to demonstrate the exact effect I was initially talking about.
Hmm, that's not very clear at all. You said "platform-specific developers can often keep themselves far too isolated", but the web isn't "platform-specific" it's 100% cross-platform and that's why Apple hates it.
The web has no APIs for this. Instead laziness is tacked on through JS, and invariably breaks find, scrolling, etc. Try scrolling to the bottom of your Chrome history: the scrollbar jumps and it's often not clear if/when you reach the bottom.
iOS has scrollbar jumps unless you know the rendered height of every list item and the complete count of list items in advance (which is why Chrome jumps, it doesn't know the entire length of your web history, it's loading it in batches)
Funnily enough, _SwiftUI doesn't support lazy table views_. Seriously. It's nuts.
I do not agree that the JS implementations have "solved" lazy tables: they're all invariably broken. For example if you hit cmd-A to Select All, Chrome history just selects what is faulted in. If you scroll down eventually you find unselected items. Safari doesn't have this problem and the main reason is its use of native tables instead of web tables.
I agree this is a big hole in SwiftUI as well. A lazy table requires cooperation between the framework and the app, which is an awkward fit for declarative UI frameworks like SwiftUI and the web.
It's not at all representative of the experience of using Gmail, Ymail, Hotmail. The web requires heroics to get quality.
macOS accessibility features alone have generally been light years ahead of Windows, for over a decade.
One such example is menus. Just about all Mac apps — even ported stuff using third party UI toolkits — hook into the standard menubar APIs, which means that every menu item of every app can have a key shortcut assigned (or reassigned) in System Preferences, even when the app's dev never bothered to add such configurability. Similarly, accessibility and scripting APIs can reliably grab the menu items of any app, improving automation and interoperability. One could probably even write a full replacement for the macOS global menubar without much fuss.
Compare this to Windows and Linux where it's quasi-normal for apps to implement menus their own way or eschew them altogether — there is no single way to grab menu items, just a ton of different possible ways, and if an app dev has decided to do their own thing you're just SoL.
- Flutter is the runaway winner, in general
- ARC looks like a mistake in retrospect - you trade 'GC overhead' for memory leaks
- keeping autolayout _and_ absolute frames looks like a mistake: a significant portion of SwiftUI overhead is spent in autolayout
- after working with Swift and _loving_ it between Swift 1 and 4, seeing the issues and watching Apple staff up and get more rigorous to solve them, stapling SwiftUI right now is unconsciable
- it requires contorting the language spec and the slow speed removes the one benefit of all the other frameworks, hot reload on device.
- Apple seems confused because they can _enumerate tractable work that would improve SwiftUI_, but the sum of that work is large enough to place a real, performant, cross platform Swift UI O(years) out (c.f. Swift's stable ABI clusterfoo)