Ask HN: Is Swift production-ready?

5 points by dmur 11 years ago | 3 comments

I'm curious to hear which companies/developers out there are already using Swift in their production apps. I'm also seeking general opinions on how production-ready the language/toolbelt is, coming out of 1.0.

For me, it still feels very early to use Swift for a large-scale app. I've found in my own usage that many of the niceties of the language are offset by painful workarounds to make Objective-C APIs play ball. E.g. computing a random CGFloat within a CGFloat range

On the other hand, it seems obvious that Swift is the future of Cocoa development. And I'm reasonably confident that many of the current issues will be addressed within the next year.

SamReidHughes 11 years ago |

It's based on Clang, right? At version 1.0, you can expect some stability, right? (I haven't been paying attention enough to know.) The people working on it are smart, right? (They are, and they're somewhat grizzled, extrapolating from the ones I know of.) I wouldn't worry about them pulling the language out from underneath you with backwards-incompatible changes -- the compiler crashing on valid code is annoying, and saying this from a no-longer-writing-iPhone-apps perspective, I think it's a big win over Objective C. So I'd go for it.

fidanov 11 years ago |

It probably depends on your project. For a smaller app you can probably start using it without any disadvantages, but I see that some larger apps have problems with it, especially during slow compilation times and bad xcode 6 support. Check this out:

http://swiftopinions.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/swift-1-0-some...

alekh88 11 years ago |

I work as a developer in US startup which creates medical apps. We have started using SWIFT.It has been fun and equally challenging to work. But I think swift is future and you should not have any second opinion about using swift in production app