Apple’s Swift Era Begins

Brent Simmons:

I’m surely not the only person to think, all week long, that this WWDC marks the end of Apple’s NeXT era and the beginning of the Swift era. […]

Even if you’ve been writing mostly in Swift the last few years, you’re still writing in a NeXT context. Your apps still live in that world, whether you know it or not. Your apps are still Objective-C apps in a very real sense.

We can quibble about whether to call the old era Apple’s “NeXT era” or “Objective-C” era. I think it works better to compare language to language, frameworks to frameworks. But it’s the same point. SwiftUI and Combine (and whatever else is yet to come) are that big of a change.

We’ll probably see a lot of Mac apps ported from iPadOS using Catalyst. Some of them — games in particular — might even be good Mac apps. But effectively, Catalyst has already been deprecated. The future of app development on all of Apple’s platforms, including those yet to debut, is SwiftUI.

★ Tuesday, 11 June 2019