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Comment by samtheprogram | Hacker News Reader

People I know who are iOS developers say differently.

The Swift language itself is bloated? Compared to what? Golang?

Something like go, yes. Imo there is benefit to only being able to do things one way, and in swift there are a lot of ways to do everything. A trivial example: why can you bind variables in pattern matches with both case let .some(x) and case .some(let x)?

Because the former works with all associated values in a case, whereas the latter does not. `case let .some(x, y, z)` vs `case .some(let x, let y, let z)`. And the latter exists because you may want some to be immutable and others to be mutable: `case .some(let x, var y, _)`.

In other words, the former is syntactic sugar and having just the latter option would suffice

Yes, but I also don't want to have to go around writing Optional<Array<String>> everywhere, so syntactic sugar is fine.

there's a meme that it has too many keywords, but this criticism is shallow. it also grew a lot of features quickly to prioritize SwiftUI support perhaps with unnecessary language complexity as a result.

I'm an iOS dev full-time now (bootstrapped) and SwiftUI is definitely not production ready if it means that it can be used without needing UIKit introspection hacks. I like it and ship all my work with it, but it is painfully broken and will take years more to mature

IMO UIKit is not production ready without Core Animation hacks.

At least you have the option in all cases.

Yeah. You can get far using SwiftUI as your scaffold but you'll need to have introspection and/or UIKit components to do any app of reasonable complexity.

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