New to App Development – Objective C or Swift | Hacker News Reader

New to App Development – Objective C or Swift

10 pointsankit19114 comments

Hi, I have been programming in C since past 4 years. I am comfortable with the complexity of pointers in C. Currently I am working for a MNC in India, but I want to become an independent app-developer. I purchased a Mac book Air and an iPhone recently and want to get started with iPhone app development in near future. My concern is what language should I start learning, Objective-C or swift ? I prefer performance/features over easy learning curve. I browsed the internet only to be more confused. Would like to hear from people who are into Apple App development since quite some time now. Also, it will be very helpful if you can list some good source to learn objective-C/swift. Thanks.

Since you already know C and are comfortable with it, start with Objective C. The hard part of app development is Cocoa and the other Apple frameworks (because they are huge), not the language. Because Swift is so new, most of the documentation and open source code are in Objective-C.

Additionally Cocoa was designed with Obj-C in mind. There are current learning pains with Swift on trying to understand how to best bridge Cocoa.

And Swift is a more complicated language than Obj-C. There are a lot more concepts to learn in Swift. (It seems like every other Swift article I come across is something about optionals.) Brent Simmons just posted this which expresses this issue:

http://inessential.com/2015/02/04/random_swift_things

And the performance of Swift is not at par with C in most cases. And debug build performance is terrible for anything realtime/multimedia/game centric. This was recently discussed by David Owens II:

http://owensd.io/2015/02/01/the-optimization-game.html

As for resources, I recommend Aaron Hillegass's (of Big Nerd Ranch) Cocoa Programming books. He has trained generations of Cocoa programmers well, since the NeXT days.

Thank you very much for your time & effort. Appreciate it.

Just start with the latest Stanford iOS class in Swift. First link under Getting Started: http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html

What about F#/C#? http://xamarin.com/

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