Re: Language options: Objective-C, Swift, C or C++?
Re: Language options: Objective-C, Swift, C or C++?
- Subject: Re: Language options: Objective-C, Swift, C or C++?
- From: Graham Cox <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2015 17:10:28 +1000
> On 13 Jun 2015, at 11:46 am, Quincey Morris <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> I also wonder if Swift is going to meet the Graham Cox test: “Will Graham use it?” I’m picking on Graham (without giving offense, I hope) because he’s a crusty (though lovable) retrovert who’s still doing manual memory management *just in case* ARC isn’t doing things right.
Ha ha! Thanks for the somewhat backhanded compliment.
You might be surprised to find that I’ve been working with ARC lately, and finding it does what it says on the tin. The only reason not to adopt it without reservation at this point is not that it might not be doing things right, it’s just that I have a huge codebase with MMM (and I’m leery of changing things that work fine without some very good reason, so converting it to ARC might do more harm than good, but that’s not a reflection on ARC, but on my own “crusty” code). Where I did give up on ARC for a small project a few months back, and went back to MMM was a feeling that it was getting *something* wrong, in that I had a huge leak I couldn’t get a grip on, but after converting laboriously back to MMM it was still there. Turned out that was a framework leak/bug that AFACS is still unfixed from 10.10.1 Also, being comfortable in MMM, ARC isn’t the breath of fresh air that it is to some - I seem able to breathe underwater just fine ;-)
Anyway, ARC isn’t an issue any longer, even for crusty retrovert me.
Swift. Well, that’s still another matter. I will definitely learn Swift, because as Roland says, that’s where the puck is going. Going, but not there yet. I’m glad to hear that Swift has come on a lot since WWDC 2014, maybe by WWDC 2016 it will be sufficiently settled. For me that’s still not really the issue - the issue is the huge chunk of Obj-C code I have to maintain every day. If I were to start a large new project I might use Swift even now, especially after last week’s announcement of Swift 2.0, but I still get the impression there is still some rough edges that cause frustration and confusion. At the end of the day my goal is to write as much income-earning code as I can, and as such I don’t have the luxury of learning a new language that I can’t be productive in, however much I’d like to. So Swift adoption is likely to be via a few small projects to dip my toe, and get comfortable, before throwing something big at it.
—Graham
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