Comment by pjmlp
4 years ago
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.
4 years ago
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.
“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.
It’s also funny to think of companies like Apple, MS, etc. as having 1 opinion or even tactic.
I know they say it. But they’re made up of 100s-1000s of groups. And at Apple especially, many of these groups are not allowed to talk to each other.
From the outside it’s easy to see companies that way. But if you’ve ever been inside a large company, you know what I’m talking about. That’s not unique to tech, either.
And rewriting software in a new language is always going to get back burnered by delivering new features. Until there’s a fundamental change they want that justifies a rewrite, a codebase is staying in its current language due to inertia.
Heck, companies will lie to themselves about these things. My favorite is this pattern
Execs: We’re all going to X!
Crowd: Yaaay. [Some project leads look at each other with a mix of sarcasm and fear.]
Initiative kicks off. Swag is distributed. Projects are identified.
Exec: [Looks at $] Well, except this one. And that one… Ok, we’ll replace all of these [waves arms] in 3-5 years.
Narrator: 3-5 years continues to be relative to the current date.
3 replies →
While there are parts of Swift that I like, I am more and more convinced as time goes on that Swift in general, and specific sub areas of Swift (like SwiftUI or Swift Charts) are destined to follow the trajectory of .NET as decried by Spolsky in How Microsoft Lost The API War [1]. To the extent this is true, it is likely smarter long term to avoid Swift except in cases where Apple has enforced its usage (like the watch).
For problem areas where Apple's frameworks provide a useful or necessary solution, accessing them from Objective-C instead of Swift is more stable. Examples like Accelerate, HealthKit, and StoreKit come to mind.
For problem areas where Apple has no advantage but you want to ship code there, oft derided but broadly usable solutions like C++ (which connects to Objective-C better than it does to Swift) or Javascript dominate.
Even Apple appears to struggle at drinking its own koolaid, given the recent criticism of the Settings port to SwiftUI. [2]
[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
[2]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/08/15/ventura-system-...
1 reply →
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?
Mostly inertia, the only new subsystem where Objective-C plays a major role is Metal, and even there most examples make use of the Swift bindings.