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Ask HN: Has anyone switched to Swift from Objective C? If not, when will you?

8 points by kevnguy ↗ HN
Has anyone switched to Swift after being released for almost half a year? I don't see people using Swift unless they're working on a new iOS app and for myself, I don't think I'll be using it until I'm forced to. Should I pick it up Swift for the sake of learning it now as suppose to later?

8 comments

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refulgentis
I have, for a major shipping product that requires extremely high reliability. The project is ~300 KLOC and about 10% Swift now. I'm so glad I put the effort in now instead of later. It'll be quite an asset over the next couple years, people seem afraid to switch from Objective-C. However, Swift is clearly superior in speed of development as well as code quality.
Gigablah
My colleague wrote part of his iOS app in Swift. He's now converting everything back to Objective-C due to bad performance and debugger issues.
bsaul
Wow... I was worried about this and didn't make the switch for this reason. Yet, i was about to. Anyone else can confirm those issues ?
lpsz
Switched, more productive due to more static-typed nature of language. Not seeing any problems other than slow Xcode autocompletion.
paintstripper
Same here, I've written toy projects and smaller apps in swift, but I'm running into lots of crashes when trying to debug. Not ready for production yet IMO.
SuperDuperTango
We had an app early in dev, and decided to make the leap from ObjC to Swift. Swift is here to stay, and as with most things the longer you put it off, the harder it'll be later. The integration between Swift & ObjC is good, so existing projects can be converted slowly.

Avoiding the conversion because Swift "isn't ready for primetime" or "the debugger is buggy" seem like excuses people make for "I don't want to expend the effort to change".

andsmi2
Currently I'm just working on small apps but I haven't had a problem with Swift vs Objective C. Development is much faster and cleaner.
0942v8653
I'll switch when Swift is ready. Right now there are lots of bugs and odd issues even when you're using it as a scripting language (how do you import a framework?) and when I try to make something using a C API it ends up being an unmanageable mess of CUnsafeMutablePointers. I realize Swift will never be as good as ObjC at C interop, but it certainly doesn't have to be this hard. On top of that, the syntax highlighting and code completion in a code could use some work (!) and crashes every fifteen seconds (!!). So there aare definitely a few things that could be improved. It was released, like most Apple things, a year too early.

Please note that I am in no way biased or prejudiced against Swift—against my better judgement I was an early adopter and I saw it as something Cocoa really needed. I'm also disappointed it isn't and may never be open source.