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deepmind.google·6d ago
AI Engineering
Hacker News·Aug 2·5 min read
SwiftUI After 7 Years: A Story of Mediocrity
TL;DR
Seven years post-launch, SwiftUI remains in a beta-like state, frustrating developers with performance issues and lack of backward compatibility. This article critiques its shortcomings compared to UIKit and highlights a troubling shift in Apple's product quality standards.
✦ Why It Matters
Evaluate your current projects to determine if SwiftUI is the right choice or if UIKit is more reliable.
Key Takeaways
- Assess the stability of SwiftUI for your upcoming projects.
- Be prepared to implement workarounds for basic functionalities.
- Consider using UIKit for performance-critical applications.
- Stay updated on SwiftUI's evolving features and limitations.
Full Summary
SwiftUI was introduced in 2019 as a modern framework for building user interfaces across Apple platforms, promising a declarative syntax and improved data flow. However, developers have faced ongoing challenges with its unpredictable layout system and performance shortcomings, leading to a sense of frustration.
The framework's data flow, which was intended to simplify state management, has become convoluted with numerous property wrappers and macros that complicate debugging. Additionally, SwiftUI lacks backward compatibility, forcing developers to implement workarounds for basic functionalities that have existed in older frameworks like UIKit.
This has resulted in a development environment where maintaining code across different versions is cumbersome and error-prone. The article argues that SwiftUI's ongoing issues reflect a broader shift in Apple's software development philosophy towards accepting mediocrity in product quality.