Comment by dinkblam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dinkblam | Hacker News Reader

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could not agree more with the author here.

Swift certainly is a nice, impressive, modern language but it seems like Apple created a language they want themselves to rewrite OS frameworks with millions of lines of code. i could also see it as a rival to C++ in Game (engine) creation. i don't see it suited at all to the average app with less than 100kloc though.

points from the article:

> […] but I personally think it's harder to master Swift than to master Objective-C

absolutely. one can learn Objective-C in an afternoon if you know C - and master it in a few weeks. mastering Swift (like C++) could take decades. why is that the case? because it is a very complex language with many advanced features (like C++) that solve problems that you don't even have in simpler languages. some of these features also solve problems for extremely complex projects or some performance requirements but the simple truth is that most apps on both mobile and desktop are relatively simple (<50kloc) and are better suited by simpler languages with high productivity.

(and you can always drop down to C if you see performance issues with Obj-C...)

> I don't see how I'm sacrificing safety by continuing to write Objective-C.

me neither. yeah Objective-C is not memory safe but no seasoned programmer would ever make those mistakes that Swift aims to solve here - with a high price.

our flagship app is still written in Objective-C and i see nothing to gain by switching to Swift.

p.s. shameless plug, if you live and breathe Objective-C and want to work on a cool app (MacUpdater), drop me a line at jobs@corecode.io

> me neither. yeah Objective-C is not memory safe but no seasoned programmer would ever make those mistakes that Swift aims to solve here - with a high price.

Citation seriously needed. Like just look at the entire history of memory safety related bugs and security issues.

have you ever had a look at any Objective-C codebase?

Objective-C is a high-level language and there usually is no memory manipulation. just because the possibility exists (via dropping down to the C part of it) doesn't mean it is done. ARC does memory management for you and there hasn't been the need for manual memory management in ages. even that was pretty hassle-free.

i can count the memory bugs i have seen our Objective-C projects in the past 10 years on one hand.

> entire history of memory safety related bugs and security issues

you are talking about C and C++, not Obj-C

One just needs to read Apple's security bulletins to know how it actually works in practice.

A citation is needed for the number of iOS projects that have more than a minuscule amount of code at the application level that risks memory unsafety.¹ The value proposition becomes stronger for the system frameworks that the app consumes, of course. (Although even the stdlib dips more than once into memory-unsafe Swift for performance.) But this brings us to another of the points from the article: is it really best to use one language for both use cases?

¹And additionally for whether those project would eliminate such code if rewritten in Swift.

Apple's security bulletins for one.

> absolutely. one can learn Objective-C in an afternoon if you know C

...See, that last part you toss off as if it's practically a given, but it's really not.

Sure, when I was (and probably you were) first going to CS classes, being taught C was pretty much the standard thing. But that's much less true now, from all I've seen.

And why not? 20 years ago, it was much, much more likely that if you were a programmer, you were going to be working with C code at some point. Nowadays, you can easily have full mastery in a dozen different languages, all of which are in widespread demand, and never touch C. (Or C++. Or C#. Or Objective-C.)

Personally, where I am at this point in my career? If I wanted to write a small utility program that runs natively on macOS, I'd pick Swift over C 10 times out of 10. I'm roughly equally familiar with both of them (which is "moderately"), and I know enough about the pitfalls of C to know that I don't want to deal with them, and Swift handles almost all of the frustration of memory management for me.

Plus, there's a single authoritative source for information about Swift for when I run into something I'm unfamiliar with, forgot, or got confused about. If I try the same in C there's literally thousands of different sources, of varying authority, across every major and minor platform that's ever existed, and every version of C. It's fantastic that there's all that information out there, don't get me wrong, but when I'm trying to write a small utility to solve a specific problem, every time I run into something that's talking about the wrong C version, or the wrong platform, or just plain has bad information, is going to add one more bit of frustration that's likely to make me quit trying.

Yes, Apple's documentation is imperfect—but I always know that it is there, acting as a single authority for the language.

>yeah Objective-C is not memory safe but no seasoned programmer would ever make those mistakes that Swift aims to solve here

Wow, that's a hell of an assertion!

Perfect C programmers strike again. Good thing they’re around and memory safety is never a problem thanks to their seasoned work.

Fortunately, Apple has a decade or more of crash telemetry that tells them exactly how often users hit such problems running code from “seasoned programmers”!

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