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Comment by turnsout | Hacker News Reader

Ignore the haters—Swift is an enjoyable and productive language that gives you a lot of advanced features if you want them, but lets you ignore them and almost treat it like a scripting language. Adding first-class wasm support could help it become a more reasonable choice for development outside the Apple platform.

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My only fear with Swift is Apple. The language itself seems largely fine, very interesting even, which makes me feel deeply conflicted.

While Apple has been big on pushing multi-platform Swift right now and distancing itself a bit from the Swift branding in some ways (e.g. it having its own GitHub organization) they've historically had quite an ebb and flow to this behavior. If their priorities changed, what happens to the non-Apple projects that adopted Swift? It would be better if there were multiple parties that had stake and some control in the future of Swift.

I have similar worries with Microsoft and .NET, although it's a bit different owing to the fact that Microsoft is quite a different company with different problems.

It's actually kind of bizarre that it never really felt like Google was a problem for Go, but I guess that's because unlike Apple Swift and Microsoft .NET, Go mostly targets and is almost entirely developed on platforms that Google has little control over. (Though that doesn't mean that their presence is entirely unnoticed, but even stuff like the module proxy has been more well-received than expected. It's an odd area where Google has managed to maintain some goodwill, though it could evaporate over night.)

I think you hit the nail on the head. By extending Go to many platforms, it doesn't feel like you're using a corporate-sponsored language (though you are). The Swift team is aware that they need to help the language thrive in other contexts, which is why they're working on projects like Embedded Swift [0]. I hope they fully embrace wasm as well!

  [0]: https://www.swift.org/getting-started/embedded-swift/

The rug-pull of Swift from TensorFlow came from Google rather than Apple.

Hey, I didn't say you should trust other Google projects. The Google Graveyard meme should be enough evidence of that.

It came from Google because they couldn’t trust Apple, actually. Also Chris Lattner having the focus of a goldfish.

He has got his mojo back now.

While the efforts are laudable, it remains to be seen where it will stand against regular Python and Julia, that actually have support from card vendors directly.

Not sure if you're aware or not but .NET these days can (officially) target pretty much anything - not just Windows. Usage on Linux definitely picked up vs. Windows because Linux servers are cheaper. Android/iOS is there. WebAssembly is also there.

Kind of, still misses a few platforms that have had JVM support outside mainstream computing, but yeah mostly great experience for target platforms.

The IDE story is a bit complicated though, either you go for Rider, or have to delve into the internal politics of VSCode vs VS, and features that VSCode will never get because there are those VS licenses to sell.

Rust, Go, and Swift were all coming up around the same time. Rust looked ugly, Go underwhelmed me, and Swift aeemed like the best “language” at the time, with many opinions that aligned with my own.

Having now spent time in all three, swift feels the most ergonomic and has features that make me feel productive. I still feel like there isn’t much “there” in Go, and rust makes me feel like I’m solving for the compiler rather than working on whatever problem I was needing to work on.

Edit to add: SwiftUI, however, is a mess that I loathe. I may be in the minority of enjoying the IoC choices in Interface Builder and AppKit.

SwiftUI is just amazing for the first 30 minutes you use it... then you make a minor syntax error deep in some nested views and you're selectively commenting out coded blocks to hone in on the error like a caveman.

It makes print-statement debugging look cutting edge.

As an early adopter of SwiftUI, this hasn't been my experience—but I understand that a lot of people struggle with it. I think it's pretty opinionated, and if you stick to the "preferred" way of doing things, life is easier.

The biggest (and known) issue with SwiftUI is the complex error messages you get, and the fact that the type checker will give up and ask you to break up your view into "distinct sub-expressions." Really the issue is almost never the complexity of a view, but some simple syntax error (passing the wrong type to a function, etc).

> The biggest (and known) issue with

Isn't this literally what the person above is talking about?

> Really the issue is almost never the complexity of a view, but some simple syntax error (passing the wrong type to a function, etc).

The issue is that this is a big, known, common problem that cannot be solved, apparently

Yeah. My understanding is the design of type inference is flawed and requires exponential complexity to resolve and it’s not fixable without breaking change.

Why this is not a top priority before literally anything else?

I agree with you, but sounds like a rough problem:

https://danielchasehooper.com/posts/why-swift-is-slow/

The author is welcome to add type annotations if they want…?

?? No other language times out error checking. This is insanity.

Not regularly but many languages have type systems that are algorithmically worse, like TypeScript

As a user, I couldn’t care less about the algorithmic beauty of the type system if it works, lets me type complex things reliably, and is fast enough to stay out of my way. Does it do that by being a mess of duct table and plywood? Totally fine for me.

Sure, but often the duct tape and plywood makes it difficult to make things that are reliable and stay out of your way.

And yet TypeScript doesn't fail with a cryptic nonsensical error just because you have the impossible component with an unfathomable number of two nested lists, like in SwiftUI.

Algorithmically worse doesn't mean worse in practice

Can you show a common line of type script that will take exponential complexity for typescript to resolve?

I think you misunderstood my comment.

Everyone misunderstood your reply.

Perhaps it was a pure academic reply? Because reality always trumps theory.

> Perhaps it was a pure academic reply

Yes, exactly.

My understanding is you are saying TypeScript has a similar complexity problem in its type system as Swift.

I am wondering if you have a common example that would timeout or have problems.

If not then I struggle to see what similarity you are seeing.

(Genuine question, I am interested in what other languages do)

No, I'm saying it has a worse system than Swift's. The point I'm making is that they've designed things such that the normal case doesn't hit this, while Swift keeps adding APIs that exercise the worst of their type system.

Yeah. I have a bunch of code with bog-standard linear algebra classes (vec2, vec3, mat2, ...). No generics, no nothing. Just simple classes with operator overloading.

After the recent minor XCode upgrade, Swift can't deduce the type for an expression `((v2 * scalar1) * v3)`, I have to split `let tmp1=v2*scalar1` for it to work.

Like, wtf, Apple?

It’s even possible to compile on one machine and timeout on another.

> deep in some nested views

It doesn't even have to be deep. I ran into this issue on very few quite simple components. The compiler just gives up because somehow swift's type system makes it impossible to figure out

This problem is very real. There is at least an ok way to avoid it getting too bad: make lots of View and ViewModifier structs, with each one having smallish amounts of code. Split them up to the extent that it feels silly.

As an added bonus, this is also the way to get good performance at run time. It helps minimize how many views need to get re-evaluated when something changes.

This is more or less how I feel too. Writing Swift feels good, and once you make a habit of avoiding code smells that trip up SourceKit, syntax coloration and all that works well enough too. SwiftUI on the other hand gets to be a mess for anything larger than small components and collection view cells.

And so I write pure code UIKit most of the time. It’s not trendy but it’s very effective.

I agree about SwiftUI. It's something I want to like, but everything about it… no.

For me, SwiftUI does exactly two things better than UIKit: tables and collection views. For everything else, it's so much easier to get stuff done with UIKit*, regardless of if I'm working with Interface Builder or making UI in code (as per various projects I've dropped into).

In theory, reactive UI is good. In practice, at least in the case of SwiftUI, the "magic" data passing does sometimes fail — perhaps someone put in the wrong @ on the property — and then you've got to debug some weird magic, and if there's a sensible place to put a breakpoint for that kind of problem I have yet to learn it.

In theory, the UI is reusable across all Apple platforms. In practice, the nature of the user experience is so different that actually trying this makes it suck for everyone — you don't want finger-sized buttons on a mouse-driven UI or tiny mouse-suitable click areas for a mobile UI, and I have no idea what the user expectations are for tvOS or WatchOS despite having written apps for both because hardly anyone shares their experiences and lessons learned.

In theory, having the code be the source of truth for the WYSIWYG editor is great. In practice, the WYSIWYG editor keeps giving up because of e.g. a compiler error, and decides to stop forever until you manually resume the preview.

* I'm mostly on iOS rather than macOS, but I'd assume UIKit and AppKit have the same strengths and weaknesses.

Even outside of iOS I’m not fully convinced that declarative/reactive is “the way”. Jetpack Compose while not as bad as SwiftUI in some ways shares many of its problems, including the magic, inscrutable stack traces, and challenges in reasoning. Past a certain level of complexity imperative UI feels more manageable.

> In theory, the UI is reusable across all Apple platforms.

This is the practice (when people are lazy). The theory that Apple presented was that you are supposed to tweak your UI for each platform and share some of the common code.

Wow, thanks for saying this. I had no idea it was even usable outside the Apple ecosystem. Seems like other IDEs support it too (https://www.swift.org/tools/).

How would UIs work on other platforms, though?

> How would UIs work on other platforms, though?

I think for right now, you'd have to use the C interop and link against something like GTK or other GUI library. I don't think SwiftUI specifically would ever work well cross-platform, it has so many Apple-isms.

There's also Swift/Win32, but it's MVC. You could also use the interop and use QT as well.

I don't think any of those are necessarily good solutions, but they are there.

TokamakUI

And https://skip.tools

Hmm, Tokamak seems abandoned (hasn't been touched in years) and skip.tools requires xCode and is Android-only =/

Thank you though.

Yes there’s nothing all in one yet. But these are promising directions. Tokamak isn’t abandoned, members are involved in core Swift changes that it depends on and have made progress recently with embedded Swift.

What sort of things are you referring to when you say "Apple-isms"? Not that I doubt your claim -- I just don't do much UI development so I don't have a good reference for what things might be 'platform specific' in that way.

As with other languages, you’d need bindings to another UI framework. In that sense, I wish SwiftUI had a different name because it seems intrinsic to Swift when it’s really no different than UIKit.

There’s stuff like SwiftCrossUI that does multiple backend bindings

https://github.com/stackotter/swift-cross-ui

And Qt was exploring some bindings using the new C++ interoperability.

There’s also Shaft, which is Flutter ported to Swift:

https://github.com/ShaftUI/Shaft

Like Flutter, this paints everything itself. It doesn’t need to bind to a UI framework directly. Instead, it needs the platform to provide primitives like a surface to draw into and input events.

> Ignore the haters—Swift is an enjoyable and productive language

Sure, if you are on Apple devices. If you are not, better to use other languages like Rust, Go, or even Dart.

Is Dart still a thing? Genuinely interested.

Yup. It got it's second life because Flutter adopted it as it's language.

It was pretty dead for a few years (despite what the googlers will tell you...)

It absolutely is and its a pleasant language to work with. Although it is in a kinda-symbiotic relationship with Flutter, I've found myself using it for small scripts and cli tools instead of Python because of its strong+static typing with null safety.

Relevant to the topic, Dart (and Flutter) supports targeting wasm.

Not only a thing but is growing at a crazy rate. Easily my favourite language out there for the last few years.

The direct competitor to Swift is most likely Kotlin and I bet it'll win out as a cross platform solution of choice in a couple of years as KMP stabilizes.

Either as shebang/interpreted script, or just compile to a binary for great startup speed. I actually only recently found out you could use swift for scripting. Turns out, you can also access all the other Apple APIs :-)

  #!/usr/bin/env swift

I made this small "shebang thing runner script" that either runs your script interpreted, or compiles and executes it. Depending on if you're on a TTY or not. I'm also changing it to simply check for the number of executions since last modified, and then compile. In some cases the extra time is well appreciated. You still get the convenience of interpreting, but also the performance of native.

It's basically a drop-in replacement:

  #/path/to/autocompile_or_interpret_swift

Very noticeable difference.

  real 0m0.212s    user 0m0.159s    sys  0m0.045s
  vs
  real 0m0.014s    user 0m0.004s    sys  0m0.008s

Ha, nice! I've used the Swift shebang before, but honestly once you have something that works as a "script," it's so easy to convert it to a real command line utility via Swift Argument Parser [0] that I usually spend the 5 minutes to wrap it up.

  [0]: https://github.com/apple/swift-argument-parser

That's pretty sweet the argparser

It's kind of nice to be able to access all native libraries. I usually use ruby, but having something compiled and strict is super nice. Shellscripting it one big minefield.

Compiling is a simple step ofc. But it's nice to only have the scriptfile and it's nice to not have your directory cluttered with binaries. I'll see if I can post it tomorrow. It's very small anyway

Yes, but then you have to compile it to use it, since scripts can’t use dependencies. Personally I just use getopt which sounds insane but it’s part of the standard library (imported from C).

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