Some thoughts on SwiftUI

I’ve been learning SwiftUI seriously for the past few weeks.

Again, as I’ve tried it before, but stopped after a few days.

It’s so incredibly similar to React.

Apart from the language, which is Swift instead of JavaScript.

It’s nothing new, of course. SwiftUI was admittedly inspired by React and of course React Native. I am just writing my impressions as a long-time React developer.

React introduced to the Web a few things that radically changed how we build applications: declarative UIs, immutability, and data-driven UI changes.

Those are mind-shifting concepts and it’s also a radical change in Apple platforms (iOS, macOS, iPadOS, watchOS).

When Apple introduced Swift in 2014, they made the smart move to be seamlessly integrated with the existing frameworks we used with Objective-C: UIKit and AppKit.

Thanks to this, Swift got wide adoption from the early stages, because developers were already familiar with how those frameworks worked, and only the language changed.

5 years after, enough time for all Apple developers to write new apps in Swift, SwiftUI (2019) allowed a radical change.

I’d say it’s even more radical than the introduction of Swift itself.

We’re now 2 years after the first introduction of SwiftUI.

Unless you’re an early adopter, you should generally wait a little bit of time for things to improve before jumping into the “new hotness”.

At first, there’s just bugs and no documentation and poor support from 3rd party libraries.

SwiftUI is now mature enough, every Swift tutorial is also a SwiftUI one, and Apple is continuing its progress to make it even more first-class.

I’m particularly excited by the Playground app allowing to build apps in SwiftUI directly from the iPad.

I think that’s a wonderful way to build software, but that’s not available yet. We only got a sneak peek at WWDC.

Especially great for simple software, the one you write when learning to code.