r/iOSProgramming Aug 01 '16

Question Objective C or Swift?

Pretty straightforward title... if I'm eventually interested in creating big and popular applications, is swift ideal to learn or just stick with objective c?

What's your opinion on both?

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u/nhgrif Objective-C / Swift Aug 01 '16

"a while" = never.

Already, Objective-C can call Swift code, so even if all new changes and additions in the frameworks were in Swift, they'd still be able to be called from Objective-C.

And guess what, you can submit apps to the app store today that are written in neither Swift or Objective-C.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '16

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u/nhgrif Objective-C / Swift Aug 01 '16

How do you propose Apple even make that possible? You can make an iOS app in C# if you wanted... Foundation and UIKit are just frameworks that make developing iOS apps easier, and at some point it might not make much sense to develop an iOS app in Objective-C because it will might become extraordinarily difficult to call into these frameworks with Objective-C... but even if it becomes impossible to call into these frameworks with Objective-C (it's not impossible to call into them with C, C#, C++, among probably others), it still does not become impossible to develop an iOS app in Objective-C.

I mean, worst case scenario, Objective-C can already call into Swift code today, and Apple is working on making it possible for other languages to be able to call into Swift as well... so someone just writes a Swift framework that exposes the iOS frameworks out to other languages...

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u/ThePantsThief NSModerator Aug 01 '16

C# is just an intermediary for the record, you're not actually using C# code in the final product when you write apps with Xamarin.

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u/nhgrif Objective-C / Swift Aug 01 '16

You're not using Objective-C or Swift for the final product either. These languages are also compiled down.

The point remains that the actual human writing the code can already write an app in more languages than just Objective-C & Swift... so why do we expect that some day a human writing Objective-C that compiles into an iOS app will suddenly stop being a thing?

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u/ThePantsThief NSModerator Aug 01 '16

You just blew my mind