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Comment by te_chris | Hacker News Reader

My problem with swift is even more simple than this guy's.

I have a new client build and really wanted to use swift for the compile time safety features. Then I started looking at ios7 compatibility...total fucking joke. After isolating what is still a very popular device, especially by revenue in the case of my client, apple have basically made it impossible use this language as long as people have customers who use an iPhone 4. In this case, for my client, that's fucking heaps of them.

It doesn't have to be this way though, they could prioritise adding support for static libs,then all developers will be able to switch over as we'll be able to use the existing libraries we rely on, but they just don't seem to give even half a shit about making it something people might actually use.

/end rant

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I don't get it, what's the problem with Swift, iOS 7 compatibility and iPhone 4? I've been working on an app for iOS 7+ devices for a few months and everything is working ok. The pains I'm facing with Swift are far from compatibility with iOS (debugging is hell compared to Objective-C).

The only thing that doesn't work in iOS7 (except for the new iOS8 APIs obviously) is frameworks. This can cause an issue on larger projects because the Swift compile can take some time but there are workarounds for during development. Supporting iOS7 and iPhone 4S's is no real problem in Swift.

This frameworks issue is not Swift specific though, it also applies to Objective-C although that has support for incremental builds so it isn't such an issue.

Or they could just wait a year for the iPhone 4 to go away, and focus their attentions on building a watch for people to firehose money at them for.

Seems pretty simple to me. Skate to where the puck is going.

I think the puck is going in the direction of an ever increasing number of people who buy used iPhones. So I don't think that the iPhone 4 is going away soon.

Looking around, I see that a lot of people who can't afford (or don't want to afford) new iPhones are starting to buy used iPhones instead of cheap new phones.

I've seen this in various circles. People seem to be getting used iphones pretty cheap. Some of them even buy apps.

Typical tech arrogance. In the real world not everyone wants to drop $1000 on a phone just because apple tell them to, so they don't.

I think Apple's only priority for Swift is to make sure future products using future versions of iOS and OSX are more attractive to buyers than other companies' future products using future versions of Android and Windows. I think Apple is fine with the idea that the best way to target their legacy devices is with their legacy language. They're probably even okay with losing people who don't upgrade quickly as customers altogether. "Let the slow upgraders switch to Android and further fragment their market instead of ours," I can imagine them saying.

I don't get the feeling that Apple is willing to sacrifice any future benefits (including simplicity) in order to improve legacy support. More than any other company I see, they want to encourage customers to abandon the past and buy something new. If Swift doesn't work very well on iOS 7, I can't imagine that ever changing except as a side effect of fixing something for iOS 8+. It's strategic focus, not incompetence.

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