SwiftUI Defaults Considered Harmful

The webpage is nigh unreadable. A snowstorm, in March, over dark text on a dark background, with unstyled code.

Look for the snowflake on the top right and click it to restore the default look.

This site is what the reader view was made for.

Not only that, it makes my phone hot and drains battery.

The article is definitely wrong on the DSL being able to be replaced by some function call. You need to be able to do conditional rendering in a convenient way. The way SwiftUI’s DSL works means a lot of dynamic equality checks for updates can be statically resolved.

Also in terms of magic values, Apple’s UI doesn’t have a fixed set of spacing values they choose from. They’ll have padding of 14px and 15px all over the place. It’s not practical to expect a developer to get them all right. And of course, this behaviour is easily disabled just by providing explicit values.

SwiftUI is excellent on iOS if you stay on the happy path. On macOS it needs a bit of work to get good results. It also has a built in escape hatch to UIkit when needed.

Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22413355