Comment by eyelidlessness
4 years ago
I wonder if Cocoa is that language specific or if it’s become legacy tech. When Swift was announced and when I explored it for personal projects, I was very much calling Cocoa APIs. They definitely catered to ObjC-isms, but my impression was that all of the underlying UI frameworks were being preserved even if they might gain additive APIs to be used less awkwardly in Swift.
This year Apple made the point Objective-C is done, time to move on, for those that were still wondering.
Around minute 4, or go through the transcript.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/102/
“Objective-C is done, time to move on” … except for Apple themselves, where we still see a steep rise in ObjC year over year with no visible sign of slowing that incline.
Likewise for AppKit.
Apple, the “do as we say, not as we do” company.
All new projects I was involved in over the past three years or more were in Swift. I would say it is considered in bad form to start a new project in anything other than Swift.
Further, I saw many legacy projects move from Objective-C to Swift (Podcasts comes to mind). (Some legacy Objective-C apps like iTunesU, sadly, were "sunsetted".)
Until recently, I believe there were issues with frameworks written natively in Swift so I saw a few smaller frameworks thrown together in Objective-C. I believe that, whatever the issues were, are no longer pertinent.
I can say too that there are many engineers that don't even know how to code in Objective-C. The younger engineers learned on Swift and are even hostile to writing in Objective-C (ha ha).
Of course Apple is a big company and I can't speak for the whole of engineering - only the teams/orgs I was involved with. And since I left Apple last year I can only guess at the current state. But the direction was clearly away from Objective-C.
As you can imagine, the biggest hurdle to 100% adoption is going to be bringing over legacy projects. Porting to Swift will probably always take a back seat to features, bug fixes. If the pace at Apple were more leisurely, not a suite of new OS releases every year, perhaps we could have our cake and eat it.
Except several systems have been rewritten in Swift for Ventura, also mentioned in other talks.
Besides this is nothing new in the industry, some Android business units and Windows ones, are quite adverse to touch anything besides C++, regardless of the guidelines to the rest of us.
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They can't be the ones to turn the lights off if they're not the last ones in the room. iTunes was famously Carbon for long after Apple said "use Cocoa now", but it came around. It's fine to tell everyone else "stop doing ObjC now", then to slowly strangle it out of their code as well.
Interesting, I wonder if that is for technical reasons (low level stuff; performance?) or just inertia?
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SwiftUI is an intermediate step in this transition. Expect the UIKit/AppKit bits to eventually disappear.
Except SwiftUI is itself built on top of AppKit/UIKit.
Many of the views are, but some do not bind to AppKit/UIKit and instead are drawn directly (I think maybe Image is one?). The idea is you could keep SwiftUI's API stable while deprecating AppKit/UIKit piecemeal underneath.
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