HI all,
a debate has recently taken place within the Objective-C/Swift dev community
concerning the lack in Swift of something “equivalent” to Objective-C runtime
programming. When using Swift exclusively, there seems to be no easy equivalent
for Cocoa fundamental design patterns such as the Responder Chain,
NSUndoManager, KVC/KVO/Bindings — and in general for code that leverages
Objective-C's dynamic features (i.e., runtime programming).
According to some developers, dynamic features in Ocjective-C grant easy coding
and high decoupling and there are concerns that Swift might make harder a
number of common Objective-C tasks (e.g., by increasing boilerplate code,
lowering readability, making high use of switch, etc.) and eventually increase
development time.
In this context, is interesting to know how those concerns are viewed within
the Swift dev community and how they could be tackled. Thus, I would like to
ask three questions that will be the base for an InfoQ article on the topic:
1. Do you envision a more dynamic Swift? Should some level of dynamism be
added at the language or framework level (e.g., to make dynamic dispatch or
some form of message passing possible, while ruling out trickier features such
as method swizzling and others) possible ? Should Swift be dynamic at all?
2. What is the challenge of making a more dynamic Swift (or adding features
to it to help solve the same kind of issues that are solved in ObjC through
dynamism)? How could that be achieved without making Swift a less safe
language? [e.g., reflection, macros, etc.]
3. Are you aware of any work that has been/is being done in Swift
development (Swift 3/Swift 4) to make Swift more capable of addressing the
above mentioned concerns?
Thanks a lot in advance!
Sergio
—
Sergio De Simone
https://www.infoq.com/author/Sergio-De-Simone
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