Since there seems to be another squall of #swiftlang hate passing overhead (e.g. ) I just want to take a moment to thank the Swift devs & say how much I like the language. Contrary to the linked article, it’s made my business _more_ tenable, not less.
Are there changes I’d like to see? Of course! No language is ever perfect — but that’s why there’s a community process for enhancements.
Plus, outside of that process, I’ve found it much easier than in Obj-C to roll my own enhancements via library extensions, yet still migrate to official ones if/when they become available (e.g. Codable, CaseIterable, DispatchQueue API improvements just to pick 3).
There’s no "one great feature" that makes Swift; its the sum of 100's of things, each easily dismissed if taken alone, but which together sum up to big productivity wins.
Obj-C's runtime was an elegant way to bring great power to C. I like and appreciate it. But two things:
1.Obj-C — perhaps because it is still C — can only use that great runtime on Objects.
2. Swift on Apple platforms also has that runtime. It _can_ introspect & be dynamic! But it can _also_ do much of that stuff (introspection, generics, protocols etc) on structs, enums & more.
These are things I constantly find useful, not in some abstract academic sense, but for real-world app development.
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