Swift Vs. Objective-C: Why the Future Favors Swift

snydeq writes: InfoWorld's Paul Solt argues that It's high time to make the switch to the more approachable, full-featured Swift for iOS and OS X app dev. He writes in Infoworld: "Programming languages don't die easily, but development shops that cling to fading paradigms do. If you're developing apps for mobile devices and you haven't investigated Swift, take note: Swift will not only supplant Objective-C when it comes to developing apps for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and devices to come, but it will also replace C for embedded programming on Apple platforms. Thanks to several key features, Swift has the potential to become the de-facto programming language for creating immersive, responsive, consumer-facing applications for years to come."

Comments

Debate settled. We know the future!

[Paradoks]

It's nice that there's a programming language debate where the future has been entirely settled. Thanks infoworld!

Objective-C was ahead of its time

[jblues]

Objective-C was ahead of its time. It uses messaging for communication between Objective-C, and using "the runtime" (a tiny virtual machine that is embedded into each executable) messages are resolved to a function pointer. Other compiled languages use static dispatch, vtable dispatch (allows overriding) or in-lining. However, messaging gives an advantage in that it affords features that are available in higher-level 'interpreted' or 'managed' languages:

• * Object introspection - describe the methods and properties of an object
• * Dynamic invocation - reflectively invoke methods of an object.
• * Method interception - add or reroute methods for all instances or a single instance of an objection, optionally calling the original.

The above features allow all kinds of useful things like Aspect Oriented Programming, instrumented objects at runtime (eg for object-relational-mapping), Cocoa's elegant property observers, etc. Another advantage is that Objective-C is close to the bare-metal so its very easy to take advantage of the above, while dropping back to raw C (or C++) as needed for performance tuning, which given the 95-5 rule is not too often.

Contrast these dynamic features, with C++ which fills another niche. Now the industry has had 30 years to forget how useful these features are, so Swift uses static and vtable dispatch. Given a virtual machine, with just-in-time compilation this is no problem, but as a compiled language it means forfeiting the above. Swift allows the above if a class extends a Cocoa Foundation class, but this problems are:

• * Developers are excited about writing 'pure' Swift.
• * The advantage or dynamic dispatch is that it can be applied to any class. Now if Swift adds compile-time AOP, this will only work with code that you have the source for.

• • I'm surprised more people didn't raise concerns about this.

Re:Uh...

[ColdWetDog]

The NSA.