[biehl]

Lovely writeup. Making that webpage must have taken quite some time also?

A question out of curiosity. What are your thoughts on re-writing in Swift?

If it were me, I am sure my tech-fingers would itch for a rewrite, but my business hands would slap those thoughts away.

[papereditor]

Thank you!

I probably would have to do it at some point if Apple decides to completely deprioritize it.

For now, Objective-C even has some benefits. It's more low-level and more hackable. And I think some older APIs are not even available in Swift.

[matt_s]

Out of curiosity is that a hand crafted page? It is a nice flow with the animations and the graphic call-outs, etc. I'm personally not interested in the Obj-C code snippets but that overall layout of the page, the sidebar ToC, the minimalist design is just really stunning.

Also - how did you do the visuals in the "Gnarly Bits" section that split the page/components out into verticals? That is such an amazing way to display the internals of a thing like a page.

If these elements could be packaged into a blog theme for whatever blog hosting platforms are popular these days I bet you'd get a bunch of people to purchase. Nice work!

[toyg]

Be real: Apple is not going to rewrite MacOs/iOs in Swift. Objective-C will always be there, offering faster and more robust features.

Just look at the Microsoft equivalent: yes, C# is good and all, but the hardcore Windows apps are still using (lightly-skinned) VC++ APIs - after almost 25 years since they started flogging .NET.

Swift is for the new rubes, bootcamp graduates and so on.

[jshier]

They're literally rewriting in Swift right now. Foundation is being rewritten entirely in Swift. All new code is in Swift. All new frameworks are Swift-only. They're using Swift from low level firmware on the Secure Enclave to apps. This is already real.

[throwaway2037]

One of the most complex apps that Microsoft produces is Visual Studio. It is currently a hybrid of C++ and C#. I suppose that almost all new features are written in C# where possible. Why won't Apply follow the same path? The developer productivity in Swift must be 10x compared to Objective C. To be clear: I write this post as someone who has infinite love for optimization of native code. However, in many situtations, it is simply more "dev efficient" to write code in a managed (VM) langauge. Thoughts?

[rewgs]

> Swift is for the new rubes, bootcamp graduates and so on.

That was a bit rude and unnecessary.