Steve Troughton-SmithDec 30

🗣️ I do enjoy a good rumor, so I'll share this nugget:

I have heard that SwiftUI has been losing political capital, and credibility, internally at Apple because it has repeatedly failed to meet software engineering goals, and needs. It's no longer thought of as clear default choice for new stuff.

That might explain why it was deemphasized at WWDC compared to the past few years.

Comforting that Apple might finally be waking up to the reality of SwiftUI, 6 years in. Glad I waited that one out 😅

Kyle Howells2d ago
Show threadSteve Troughton-Smith

This one is getting traction again lately, so I'll add some fun bits of context. Apply salt *liberally*

• I've heard Swift is also under fire from certain corners at Apple, lumped in with SwiftUI — many frameworks built atop it just aren't working to a standard people are happy with, it's dramatically increased the resources and time required to build the OS, and it does not work well enough at the OS and kernel level in embedded or secure contexts
• Paraphrased: 'Even Tim knows SwiftUI sucks'

Apr 3 at 9:15amIvory for Mac
Show threadSteve Troughton-Smith3d ago
(There are lots more supporting anecdotes to share, someday. And none of this means that SwiftUI or Swift is 'going away' by any means. I'm sure there are plenty of juicy stories about the development of AppKit, UIKit, Carbon, and all the other frameworks that have succeeded, or fizzled out)
Show threadTrezzer (aka Helvedeshunden)3d ago
@stroughtonsmith It sure seems like new UI frameworks are a nigh-impossible task. Apple and Microsoft certainly have a lot of almost-but-not-quite-gone frameworks between them. The recent news about Windows 11 getting more "native" apps had me legitimately pondering what that even means today. WinUI3? WPF? WinForms? Win32? What even is a UI??
Show threadarin3d ago
@trezzer @stroughtonsmith
Only a few years ago Android very successfully adopted a new declarative UI framework that’s now widely used in production and even expanding into cross-platform. SwiftUI today is still not as capable or reliable as Jetpack Compose was on release. It’s far from an inherently bad concept but Apple’s narrow-mindedness and refusal to backport most features has made its success impossible
Show threadIvan Mir1d ago

@trezzer @stroughtonsmith WinUI3 of course, it's pretty mature by now

I used it in 2021 without much problems, so LLMs also should know it well

Show threadJohn Davis3d ago

@stroughtonsmith man, this makes me sad as someone who is basically all-in with swiftUI these days.

I wish they would just “fix it”, but historically Apple seems to abandon and replace things rather than give them attention.

Show threadSteve Troughton-Smith3d ago
@its_john_davis I think SwiftUI is far too big to abandon, and even if they did split it up into its individual components I imagine it would stay source-compatible
Show threadDimitri Bouniol3d ago
@stroughtonsmith This is probably why we’ve finally been seeing movement on big type checker improvements landing on main over the past couple of months — they finally feel the pain the rest of us have been yelling about.
Show threadKarl Baron3d ago
@stroughtonsmith I just pray they solve it by *fixing it* rather than going the Microsoft way of adding yet another framework, or just shrugging and letting everyone default to web stack crap like React/Electron
Show threadMatt2d ago
@kalleboo @stroughtonsmith they don't have too. Just go back to improving UIKit and Objective-C.
Show threadJohn Gordon2d ago

@apple4ever @kalleboo @stroughtonsmith Is there a dev path that best supports ai-coding?

If there is then they will choose that.

Show threadKarl Baron2d ago
@apple4ever @stroughtonsmith Aside from a handful of curmudgeons, nobody is going back to UIKit and Objective-C. If that's their plan, developers will end up going to a third-party solution not controlled by Apple.
Show threadMatt2d ago
@kalleboo @stroughtonsmith This curmudgeon can dream though!