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Swift has been a hugely successfully language.

Mostly at slowing down iOS runtime performance per clock cycle, and increasing compilation times.

Its also been hugely successful at punishing companies for using it, since it didnt really work for a few versions.

While there have been fewer crashes (sort of) due to the switch, as someone who worked for years in Objective C and years in Swift, I honestly never felt that Swift significantly improved much except allocation rituals and properties.

I do however enjoy Kotlin for the backend because it has some nicer semantics for object construction.

While I do admire the work that Apple has put into Swift, I really felt that Apple was trying to "impress everyone", with a whole lot of bikeshedding and sick amoutns of code generation to convince us it was the right thing to do.

Frankly, apps run over 10 times faster in obj C and xcode with Swift is probably my least favorite and sort of non-ergonomic experience close to DOS batch file dev in Windows Notepad.



Given karismatic a prize.

I wonder if the current state of affairs is what Chris L had in mind?


I don't know, but Chris L was always a C++ guy, he never really understood Objective-C in my opinion, which is why Swift ended up the way it did. I doubt he ever used it very much, or had a deep understanding of it.


I’m pretty sure Chris Lattner has a good grasp of Obj-C, after all they had to design Swift in a way it could easily interface with Obj-C. While Swift went through some versions to become stable, they were always transparent on the roadmap and had a very open attitude towards community proposals. Looking back I think it was a very well executed transition and would consider it a success in every way.




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