My introduction to Swift / SwiftUI
I am taking a course on iOS Development and as we know, Swift is the programming language used for iOS development. I’ve been playing around with Swift, and I’ve been loving it so far.
What is it to love about Swift?
Coming from a JavaScript background, I love how Swift is designed from the ground up to be a safe and feature-rich language.
Strong typing
I have always appreciated the strong typing brought by TypeScript, it makes you move fast and safely. Thankfully, Swift is designed to be a strongly typed language, which means you can be sure that the data you are working with is of the correct type.
Optionals and error handling
Swift provides great syntax sugar for handling optionals and errors. I particularly like try? and try!, which allow you to convert errors into optionals. This makes your code more expressive and easier to read.
SwiftUI
Before I learned Web Dev, I dabbled in iOS development for a little bit of time. The reason It didn’t click for me was how UIKit is a pain to work with. Switching to doing React & other Web frameworks was a much better experience, they are declarative and fun to work with. Now SwiftUI brought a lot of the benefits of the declarative approach to iOS development.
Data Binding
Data binding is - although it could be dangerous - it can simplify how you build your UI (If you know what you are doing).
What is it to not love about Swift?
Language Server
The language server sucks, it’s slow and crashes often.
Previewablity
I know for a compiled language, Apple had tried hard to make SwiftUI previewable. But coming from a JavaScript background, I miss the hot module replacement and the ability to see the changes in real time.
Decorators
Decorators are not a good idea…
Styling
There are a lot of hidden styling in SwiftUI, and the ways you can style things are not very consistent or intuitive.
e.g. When you use a List
Doing this:
List {
}
.background(.red)Does not work, but this does:
List {
}
.scrollContentBackground(.red)Ok, what’s the conclusion
I think Swift is a very exciting language. Weirdly I think it has great potentials outside of iOS development as a high-performance & safe language. We are seeing its adoption in apps like Arc or Ladybird. And I think SwiftUI is a great step forward, but still has a lot of room for improvement.