Swift 2.2 + Xcode 7 wasn't great, but it was livable.
Constraint SourceKit crashes makes Xcode essentially a text editor and not a good one. All indexing, highlighting essentially all IDE functionally lost.
This is the worst development experience that I've seen in 20+ years as a developer.
I thought the CoreData / CloudKit debacle from 3 years ago was bad, but oh my God, I just want to jump ship and go to Android, switch to Xamarin, or just leave mobile at this point.
It would be nice to have some level of optimism and say this is growing pains, but I don't have any faith that the Apple developers are competent in making this better.
The failure in releasing Xcode 8.2/iOS 10.2, but not updating the iTunes Connect backend to allow iOS 10.2 as the max was pretty disheartening. All apps were automatically rejected for half the day. How does something like that slip through the cracks? To find out if it was fixed I had to periodically check twitter :\. There was no blog post, no status page I could check - my only hope was some unlucky dev I found that didn't even work on the iTunes Connect/App Submission team.
I think the consensus is that we need nothing but bug fixes on the core stuff (Xcode, SourceKit, etc).
But the compiler crashes and sourcekit instability are just breathtaking (even in 3.0+). I'm surprised I haven't seen this get more attention.
I'd (somewhat) expected something like this for the first few releases, but two years in I'm starting to think the team bit off more than they can chew with the type system.
The latter category is especially nasty, and SourceKit won't inform you of this, except perhaps to crash. Oh, and that dumb bar in Xcode.
You can compile all the Swift source in your target successfully but have SourceKit choke on your build configuration. Accidentally introduce a duplicate set of headers in HEADER_SEARCH_PATHS? Degraded performance, and at worse, the compiler crashes everytime you edit text and SourceKit invokes the compiler. In cases like this the SOURCEKIT_LOGGING environment variable is your friend. Have fun combing through those logs to tease out what build option you set is causing your issue.
I spent the better part of two days sifting through SourceKit logs to figure out why a project's autocomplete wouldn't work. Yet, I wouldn't want to go back to writing Objective-C primarily. Because Swift as a language rocks.
C++ is the prime example of what the alternative looks like.
My girlfriend has decided to learn programming. She started with Swift because she wanted to write iOS apps. The course she's using targets Swift 2 but her install is Swift 3, or something like that (I haven't looked into it much).
XCode constantly flags stuff like x++ being replaced with x += 1. Really? Surely that's the kind of decision you make before version one of a language, not years after release. Why this pointless churn?
If these sorts of totally-indecisive deprecations were rare then you could overlook them, as otherwise Swift is a rather nice language. But they're everywhere. Even in trivial examples intended for beginners line after line of code gets the yellow deprecation warnings. "What does deprecated mean" was literally one of the first questions my girl asked me as she started out learning programming, which is ludicrous. You shouldn't be encountering deprecation warnings over and over when targeting a brand new platform using a teaching course barely a year old.
Changes to Swift are hardly indecisive or pointless. A very clear rationale for removing the ++ operator was laid out here: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/proposa....
While these changes may be painful now (though the removal of the ++ operator seems minor to me), they should result in a stronger and simpler language in the long run.
Removing x++ is indeed minor, which is why it's so curious. Sure, there are arguments for removing it. But there are also arguments for minimising language churn and just living with these things.
Definitely going against the general language trend, there.
And the justifications to remove ++ are downright bizarre in my opinion.
I think that this kind of break is not that bad, swift is a young language, and there are some things that only after so much testing you realize it could be better.
Swift is 2.5y old, it has just one year being open source, so I don't think these breaking changes as a big deal. It is not in a situation like Python 3. Even the compiler helps you fix it and XCode is very helpful when translating Swift 2 to Swift 3, so it is not that bad.
Of course, age only tells you so much about the amount of work put into the project, and Rust in particular took a huge amount of conceptual work to get its current model of ownership.
Btw, Xcode still doesn't support refactoring Swift code
And in spite of all problems with Java and its standard library, there's something very liberating about having code written in 1997 that still compiles and works in 2017.
And the beauty of Java is that it became a platform, so if you hate the language, you can pick another that's closer to what you think programming should be, like Scala, Clojure, JRuby, Groovy, Kotlin, etc. and still benefit from that piece of code written in 1997, all made possible due to Sun's fanatical devotion to backwards compatibility.
Where Swift excels is that it has the performance of C for the most part, and it will continue to improve. Another strength is ARC over Java style GC. As the slides point out, to get the same performance with GC, you need 4x the memory. With only 2x the memory, you get 70% lower performance with Java. Most important, though, is determinism. GC is simply not suitable for real time, hard or soft.
I'm very excited about Swift, and the current version of Xcode is working pretty well for me. I love the aggressive goal of replacing the C family of languages down the road...
I'd take that claim with a pretty big grain of salt. The paper they referenced used an experimental GC without use in production. Who knows how well or bad the default collector in the JVM would perform.
Also, it is not exactly recent. Hardware changes could have shifted the result in any direction.
Regardless, determinism is the really big win. :-)
That said, if you're looking for a language that has kept backwards compatibility, that's Clojure. Rich Hickey has a recent keynote that I found very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk
I don't know how to feel about it. On one hand this means Clojure will probably never fix some obvious mistakes in its standard library, without changing its name (like what they did with ClojureScript). On the other hand, as I said, it is liberating to have code written in Clojure 1.0 still working in 1.8.
Yes, like the "courage" it takes to remove the 3.5mm headphone jack.
That list is quite impressive, hundreds of crashing cases discovered manually, and nearly thirty thousand crashes fuzzed.
XCode doesn't always crash (though it does, frequently), but syntax highlighting goes away at the first hint of an issue.
I really don't understand how a compiler can crash that much ( actually i've been coding in many client and server languages before and it's the first time i see a compiler crashing while i code). It makes me really nervous, because it shows that unit tests aren't good enough, and that the language is really in alpha stage, not more.
As for compilation time, you may think it's just a matter of optimisation. But the problem is that until those optimisation arrive, you can't rely too much on type inference (main source of slowdowns), which diminishes a lot the beauty of the code.
Now that was for client side. Server side probably adds its share of issues.
I used to be very optimistic for this language, but i'd say the swift team only has one more shot to make it really production grade, before the word spreads that this language is for now just a joke ( maybe apple using it for its own app would help allocate more resources).