I’ve been playing around with Swift for a few months now and have been happy with the language and making applications with it BUT there where problems, bugs and annoying crashes while developing with Swift and XCode. During the Beta phases this was OK but now that the XCode 6.0 is out as non Beta some of the same bugs still exists and for me two bugs are the most annoying and a show stopper which keeps me from not using Swift with iOS development up until Swift and XCode matures and the bugs are Fixed.
The two most annoying bugs are:
- XCode “intellisense” and indexing crashing once application and code complexity evolves
- Swift compiler bugs where you are forced to clean your development environment or create a new development environment from scratch because XCode and Swift compiler refuse to compile your code citing to illogical errors that are not there. This was a big show stopper since the code had no syntax errors and would compile on another Mac OS development image.
Long story short once my application grew in size, functionality and complexity Swift and XCode started to fall apart forcing me to state that I have to move to other languages and frameworks to do what I need to do for the application to work. As a developer nothing is more annoying than tools that do not work and make you use hours upon hours to fix or go around the issues.
Others seem to feel the same way:
http://2359media.com/developers-insight-swift-is-not-ready-for-production-code/
It’s a shame, Swift looks promising but for now it is best to stay away in anything else than small projects and testing of new functionality.
For the love of challenges :) 