
Should I Use Objective C or Swift for Writing iOS Apps? - melling
https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/should-i-use-objective-c-or-swift-for-writing-ios-apps
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geophile
Yes, obviously Swift.

I am brand new to iOS development, and picked Swift for this exact reason. I
figured that if it proved to be a bad choice, I'd find out quickly and learn
Objective C. Here are my impressions so far.

\- The Apple documentation does a good job of covering both languages.

\- A lot of 3rd party documentation is being maintained to cover Swift, e.g.
much of the material on raywenderlich.com.

\- There are good libraries. Objective C libraries for networking and JSON
have Swift versions (alamofire, SwiftyJSON, Starscream).

\- While it isn't difficult to understand Objective C answers to questions,
(e.g. on StackOverflow), there are often Swift answers too.

\- I haven't found anything that works in Objective C but not Swift, but then
I haven't tried anything very advanced either. My app is very simple so far.

I think that Swift has some bizarre and ugly features, but it seems much nicer
than Objective C.

One negative: XCode is not a great IDE for Swift. Refactoring just doesn't
work. Renaming things tied to the UI via the storyboard is asking for trouble.
I don't know whether this is true for Objective C also. In general XCode is
just way, way behind Intellij, the IDE I use for Java.

~~~
melling
if you like IntelliJ, there's always AppCode:

[https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/](https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/)

~~~
geophile
Just started playing with it. Looks _very_ promising.

