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0 points52-6F-628y ago0 comments

That's an interesting problem. Do you find it's that bad for a new project as well? I've otherwise heard nothing but good things about working with Swift, and it's the only macOS/iOS-specific language I've actually worked with a little bit for its rather quick learning curve.

So I guess the problem is pretty simple, if not immediately obvious for the details of it.

I sigh and guess that means I just have to upgrade soon...

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mahyarm8y ago

The swift scalability problems start coming up around 70k lines of code, so for the typical case of 1 or 2 developers it doesn't come up. But if you start getting a large codebase:

* indexing will take forever

* xcode will beachball continuously

* the debugger will crash because the codebase is too much to handle

* build times will be 4-5x more than the equivalent obj-c codebase

* startup times will balloon significantly if you have many separate libraries, since using swift forces you to use dylibs. 60-100 libraries will mean 3-5 seconds being added to your app startup time

They are all solvable problems, but it will take several years before they are fixed. But I don't think swift will be better than C++ development, since they are both similar languages as far as compiler tradeoffs go.

I notice some lag even in small swift projects compared to objective-c, but it isn't major enough to worry about.

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