Just to be clear: innovative for Apple development community or innovative generally? Please list some/all innovations, I would be happy to reconsider.
Apple GUI development is obviously a major constraint. Another is: no GC in order to avoid the collections happening when they want and thus making the smoothness of the UI impossible.
I still claim there isn't at this moment any more innovative language that can provide that what Swift provides, observing any GUI platform you want to observe: meaning that level of support for the platform's native GUI with that performance and elegance.
Filling a niche is not being innovative. Is totally fine, and it might be big deal, but if you take the language by itself it doesn't bring anything new to the table. But I might be wrong, so feel free to point to an innovative language feature.
It's the most innovative performant language for any GUI. There are maybe more innovative but less usable languages. If there isn't any better existing for any other platform, it's certainly not Apple's fault.
Wow, when I went to bed this comment was at 2 karma. Now it is at a negative (-3) and so are all the comments in this chain of replies that was critical of Apple's product, when before they were not greyed out. Fancy that. :)
Red herring. aidanhs' reply was to someone who genuinely asked why garbage collection is problematic. The comments I'm talking about have not mentioned garbage collection, just questioning what innovative really is. I guess you then tried to infer that they thought that garbage collection vs. reference counting doesn't matter, i.e. isn't innovative? I find that to be an unfair inference. They might as well think that something like that has already been done/is being done, i.e. with Rust and how it relegates any automatic memory management to opt-in libraries.
So it seems to be a disagreement about what is really worthy of being called innovative, not any technical merit, as the comments that I'm talking about has not questioned that.
> From the article:
> "no, your experience with server-side programming does not adequately prepare you to “think small” and correctly reason about mobile performance."
Straw man, unless you somehow know that all of these people only have experience with server-side programming.
I see the source of your confusion now. To me innovation means something absolutely new, not re-applying/combining prior art. Wikipedia agrees: "Innovation differs from improvement in that innovation refers to the notion of doing something different rather than doing the same thing better."
Apple is doing something different and new, comparing all available languages capable to produce fast non-stuttering GUI based applications that work smoothly even on the smartphones and demand minimal resources. And it's not a small feat by any comparison.
It's like you'd read about the first usable jet-powered car and then claim "but it's not innovative, there were jet powered planes already."
You're talking incredible nonsense. I can create fast non-stuttering GUI applications on phones with minimal resources (talking <$100 phones here) using F#. F# is far more feature rich than Swift is or ever will be. I have been able to do so ever since Windows Phone first came out. But that's not something F# does, but Windows Phone happens to be very good at non-stuttering GUI based applications that work smoothly even on smartphones with minimal resources.
Don't pretend iOS' fluidness is some merit of Objective-C or Swift, because it is a merit of the operating system.
then complain to all the authors that measured all that they measured (a lot of links and diagrams there) instead of complaining to me. It will still be an attempt to confront all the real measurements with your anecdotal evidence of one, your, particular case, unless you manage to disprove all the claims listed there.
How is memory usage relevant to creating fluid/responsive applications? How is JavaScript DOM management even comparable to native UIs where the UI thread runs with realtime priority in native unmanaged code? And when did we stop talking about programming languages and talking about runtime and operating systems?
You were talking about a language's capabilities of creating fast responsive UIs on limited hardware. There are no language features that contribute to that, it is the operating system and runtime that does that. Are these things well done on Apple systems? Yes, absolutely. But that has no relation whatsoever to the discussion whether Swift is an innovative language or not. Apple could have bolted Common Lisp, Fortran or Rust onto that runtime, and that would have no relevance at all to the discussion about the innovativity of those languages.
Windows Phone also has a good runtime despite that it runs various garbage collected languages. Fluid apps are created for it all the time for low memory systems in various languages. But that doesn't make Visual Basic an innovative language.
> How is memory usage relevant to creating fluid/responsive applications?
Mobile phones are generally memory constrained as compared to desktop computers, because memory takes space and power. In addition, their memory bandwidth is usually _extremely_ constrained as compared to desktop computers, making big copies, etc, expensive.
You're showing some incredible arrogance here by not addressing my other points. You fail to address the point how specifically the Swift language (not the Swift runtime) is so innovative that it enables fast apps on resource constrained devices. Because I can name dozens more languages that could do the same with native access to the Apple runtime.
> I can name dozens more languages that could do the same
How about naming one that actually now does the same with the native access to any GUI resource constrained platform? F# certainly can't avoid the graph quoted. The y axis is the slowdown as soon as there isn't enough memory. The point you yourself claim that you don't understand, so how can we discuss anything further? I actually wrote my comments assuming that the people who'd discuss would understand the issues I assumed to be well-known and thoroughly documented among other places in the Drew Crawford's article.
> @acqq
Don't hang me up on a figure of speech. It's frustratingly rude. I do understand how memory management relates to fluid applications. I don't understand how that point relates to Swift's innovativity, and you give the impression that you don't either. Please at least have the courtesy to show how the Swift language has an innovation that allows for responsive UIs. There are dozens of languages that are or can be reference counted.
There is absolutely nothing in the software world (or anywhere really) that meets your criteria for innovation then. I guarantee that absolutely anything you consider innovative fails the test you just described.
> To me innovation means something absolutely new, not re-applying/combining prior art.
You may have considerable difficulty finding a language that anyone uses that is innovative, in that case. Most new programming language concepts are explored in research projects, and _then_ incorporated into languages.
