The cognitive burden of Swift is far too high for what it delivers, and it gets redesigned every year or two to be "different" than it was before, which makes finding example code online a challenge.
ObjC added about two dozen keywords to C and was rejected by the masses for use of [] insteqd of (). Is it really massively different to type:
MyObject * object = [MyObject new];
rather than:
MyObject * object = new MyObject;
Hell, you can even stretch to using property dot-syntax in ObjC:
MyObject *object = MyObject.new;
It pretty much manages memory for you with ARC, the only thing you have to look out for being instance-loops where A retains B and B also retains A. It has closures (blocks) as a basic language type, and it is a true superset of C (unlike C++) so any C program will compile with the ObjC compiler. It also integrates with C++ for that matter.
Apple has invested too much in Swift for it to back down now, and I see some documentation is now Swift-only, not ObjC, so the writing is on the wall, but equally Apple has an enormous amount of internal code in ObjC, so it's going to be a long time before support goes away entirely.
And then, I'll just move to Linux. I've already written a basic implementation of a lot of the parts of Cocoa [1] with an SDL3 back-end, you even get GPU/compute shaders :) and although it's not ready for prime-time (the fit-and-finish needs some attention) it is the basis for me ultimately not needing to use Swift in future, a decade or so down the line, the bonus being that it'll work on anything - I have a proof-of-concept for it running on Windows, and GNUstep on Linux ought to make it easy to port there.
spacedcowboy•13h ago
The cognitive burden of Swift is far too high for what it delivers, and it gets redesigned every year or two to be "different" than it was before, which makes finding example code online a challenge.
ObjC added about two dozen keywords to C and was rejected by the masses for use of [] insteqd of (). Is it really massively different to type:
rather than: Hell, you can even stretch to using property dot-syntax in ObjC: It pretty much manages memory for you with ARC, the only thing you have to look out for being instance-loops where A retains B and B also retains A. It has closures (blocks) as a basic language type, and it is a true superset of C (unlike C++) so any C program will compile with the ObjC compiler. It also integrates with C++ for that matter.Apple has invested too much in Swift for it to back down now, and I see some documentation is now Swift-only, not ObjC, so the writing is on the wall, but equally Apple has an enormous amount of internal code in ObjC, so it's going to be a long time before support goes away entirely.
And then, I'll just move to Linux. I've already written a basic implementation of a lot of the parts of Cocoa [1] with an SDL3 back-end, you even get GPU/compute shaders :) and although it's not ready for prime-time (the fit-and-finish needs some attention) it is the basis for me ultimately not needing to use Swift in future, a decade or so down the line, the bonus being that it'll work on anything - I have a proof-of-concept for it running on Windows, and GNUstep on Linux ought to make it easy to port there.
[1]: https://github.com/ThrudTheBarbarian/Azoth