‘Oldie Complains About the Old Old Ways’

Brent Simmons:

So, again, I’m documenting the problems currently solved by Objective-C’s dynamism, and suggesting that Swift, as it evolves, needs to take these problems into account. The foundation should be built with some idea of what the upper floors will look like.

The answer doesn’t have to be that Swift is dynamic in the way Objective-C is, or even dynamic at all. But the eventual Swift app frameworks need to solve these problems as well as — hopefully better than — UIKit and AppKit do right now. And those solutions start with the language.

I love Brent’s open-minded approach to this debate. One thing I’ve seen some “I’ve switched to Swift and don’t miss the dynamic aspects of Objective-C” proponents seemingly overlook is that today’s Swift apps for iOS and Mac rely (deeply) upon the dynamic Objective-C runtime and frameworks. There’s no such thing as a pure-Swift app on iOS or Mac today — they’re apps written in Swift on top of dynamic frameworks.

★ Wednesday, 25 May 2016