What does /g/ think of Swift? Particularly in comparison with

>>56319806
bump

Apple keeps changing the API in between versions.
That makes it feel somewhat incomplete and not well thought out.
If it was complete and well thought out, they wouldn't have to make drastic, non-backwards compatible changes to it all the time.

Yeah, oh course the language is much more comfy than obj-c. That language is just awful.

>>56319806
>>56319879
objective c is cool :(

>>56319879
I agree with this. Each major Swift version has introduced breaking changes which is annoying, but that will hopefully end in the future once it matures a little bit. The language is still in its infancy.

>>56319885
I've never been a fan of it. I can program in it, but when I have the choice between Obj-C and Swift I'll pick Swift.

>>56319806
It's pretty cool, although I don't think it will start to really catch on until version 4 is released next year with ABI stability and whatnot.

I haven't really used Swift enough to know whether its better than Obj-C, but it is definitely far more concise and easier to read

>>56319945
I'd say it's better purely because of the type safety you get.

In Swift optionals are baked into the language. When you define a type you can make it nullable or not nullable, unlike in Obj-C and many older OOP languages. So just by looking at the type definition of a variable you'll know whether it can be null or not.

And of course, you can finally have type safe arrays and what not unlike in Obj-C.

It's like Java morons forbidding Java 8's features in new projects. They spent so much time learning how to work around the language's quirks that they take any improvement as an attack to what makes them experts and puts bread on their tables.

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>>56320018

>>56319982
Yeah, the optionals in Swift are a pretty good feature.
Also, do you think that Swift will ever become popular (outside of OS X/iOS) once it becomes open source?

>>56320200
I'm not sure, but I feel like it won't anytime soon. Maybe in a few years. Apple has marketed it as a very platform specific language so I feel like most people will continue to associate it with macOS and iOS

>>56319806
being made by apple puts it at a disadvantage anyway. its fine

>>56320018
Good luck justifying losing like 40% of your customers for using the 4 minor improvements of Java 8 to the bean counters.

In a better world, oracle's jewish licensing models would have ended Java long ago.

PHP 7 has the same problem. You want to use it? You can't. The shitty poorhosters still don't offer it (duuuude, it was only released a year ago, we need some time to adapt, maaan) and that's not even talking about the customers' own servers and their sysadmins who neither know how to upgrade anything, have permission to or have compatible binaries for the Ubuntu 06.04 or whatever "has been serving their company well" for years.
Or the fucking PHP C extensions which you always assumed would be installed in any standard distribution of PHP until some "we compile our PHP ourselves with -Ofast with no extension-bloat lel" failhoster proves you wrong.

God I hate this language. But at least it makes me appreciate how nice some languages like C# and Swift are.

>>56319806
It's trying to be a better C, but that can't be done. C is as low level as it gets (without being unportable assembler) and it will never be replaced.

>>56320808
>It's trying to be a better C
It's not trying to be C. Swift is more focused on the high level than the low level.

>>56320821
In that case, it's
1- useless for mobile
2- and useless for desktop apps
Why talk about it.

>>56320871
high level does not mean bad performance. if the abstractions have a low cost they can only be beneficial.

programming everything in C nowadays is just dumb. C is a really old language full of problems, namely no memory safety, no way of handling multi byte strings well, no high level abstractions, etc.

it's performant, yes, but sacrificing a bit of performance for guaranteed compile time type safety is worth it. processors have gotten really fast and memory is abundant.

>>56320871
For mobile apps, it doesn't matter what language you write them in. You have these dozens of widgets that the OS provides you that are already as optimized as can be for you and you just wire between them.
You're not trying to find new prime numbers.

There are very few parts of the code where performance matters and for those, you could always use C.
Android offers that (via NDK).
Swift was made to easily interoperate with code written in Objective-C.
And I believe the .net platform for Windows has C++/CLI if you need that.

>>56320821
GTFO you disgusting macfag

go jizz on your macbook

>>56320821
Actually since it uses reference counting, it can be used in some C use cases