Here's a prime example of what developers mean when they question "is SwiftUI ready for production?”
A simple menu. Left iOS 16.4. Right iOS 17.0.
One works. One fails. Same code.
I love SwiftUI, but it's this kind of thing that make me lose confidence in it.
https://gist.github.com/phillipcaudell/269e1d9abe1dea1709327fc95560760f
No doubt you can ship amazing things with SwiftUI. I see many great examples of it.
But I also see many examples of developers pulling their hair out trying to understand why their app isn't behaving as expected.
Things that once worked now don't because of an OS update. Or some modifier begins interacting with something in an unexpected way. Or something isn't clearly documented.
Airbnb's recent article highlighted something I think about a lot:
"While Swift and its surrounding foundation have been open sourced, SwiftUI’s implementation remains a black box. If SwiftUI were open sourced, we could better understand the framework and debug more effectively.”
I don't think Apple will ever do it, but boy that would go a long way in fixing many of the issues SwiftUI has today.
(The whole article is great read, btw)
https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/unlocking-swiftui-at-airbnb-ea58f50cde49
@phill Although I agree that all those change of behaviours between versions are annoying, I have to say that we all faced many problems with UIKit in a long past.
Countless hours in new iOS releases checking the hacks we needed to implement for something that UIKit didn’t support. Hours debating about dropping something in favor of a new API for newer iOS versions, etc.
I see the same happening with SwiftUI, just that this time we have much more platforms to discuss.
@phill I didn’t see people in the past discussing “oh is UIKit ready for production?” because that was the only option we ever had, so we collective had to invent clever ways around it and share in StackOverflow.
Now that we can openly discuss “why SwiftUI is not open-sourced” is already a long, long way from that past that it wasn’t even thinkable.
@rabc You're absolutely right that UIKit is not without its faults: https://mastodon.notsobig.co/@phill/111108006903449808
But we're in year 4 and the fundamentals like List and Navigation are still having significant issues. That is different.
