‘Swift Finally Matches Objective-C in One Major Way’

The editor of Dice’s “Insights” blog argues that Apple’s Swift language “has begun to eclipse Objective-C in a key way.” Apple was never shy about prioritizing Swift. As one developer on Twitter pointed out, once Swift dropped, Objective-C documentation and tutorials quickly started vanishing. Since then, the company has iterated on Swift and continued to shy away from Objective-C (except when necessary, such as supporting libraries and frameworks). Swift 5 made an important step forward with ABI stability, which means Swift code worked directly with a binary interface. Before ABI stability, the only safeguard was code was compiled on the same compiler, a fingers-crossed approach Apple really had no option for avoiding… Swift’s performance has also improved. For some time, when compared to Objective-C, Swift compiled slower. Because of ABI stability, performance has improved, and compile-time differences have vanished… Apps written in version 5 are also roughly 10-15 percent smaller than Objective-C apps. Bridging performance also improved. A lot has gone into Swift 5 to make it more stable, and those improvements have resulted in performance parity with Objective-C… It’s time to seriously consider the move to Swift. In 2017 the creator of Swift (and a self-described “long-time reader/fan of Slashdot”) began a five-month stint running Tesla’s Autopilot team — and stopped by to answer questions from Slashdot readers.