Instagram Dev, Swift Speaker & Swift Weekly Brief: A Top Dev Interview With Jesse Squires

Love for Swift

What’s the best feature you love in Swift 3.0 and how do you see the future of Swift going?

The huge collection of API and syntax refinements has made a huge difference. Once you get over the painful migration, these improvements really make Swift a pleasure to use.

Jesse is a Swift fan!

Jesse is a Swift fan!

As far as features, pretty much everything you need to know is on GitHub. But more broadly, I think Swift is on its way to being the dominant language on Apple’s platforms. It will take years, but eventually I think Objective-C will begin declining more rapidly. The day that Apple releases a pure Swift framework — that will be the turning point. I’m not sure when that will happen, but we know that Apple isn’t shy about abandoning old technologies.

For other platforms, it’s difficult to predict. IBM is pushing for Swift on the server, and there’s now an official Sever APIs Project. Once server-side Swift matures, my bet is that it will take off. There’s so much enthusiasm for Swift on the server.

As far as Android goes, I doubt Swift will ever be a first-class language. For that to happen, Google would need to invest in it and I don’t see that happening.

You have now ported most of your open source libraries to Swift, how did you go about doing this?

I migrated to Swift 3 in two distinct steps:

1. I first migrated projects to Swift 2.3 and released major version updates.
2. Then, I turned around and migrated to Swift 3 and released another major version update.

I did this so anyone using my projects could stay on Swift 2.3 if needed while allowing the projects to continue moving forward. I made the decision not to maintain any older versions of Swift for any projects because I simply don’t have time.

What advice would you give to somebody who wants to start building with Swift?

I would definitely say do it! Personally, I think I write code faster and better with Swift.

However, you should be aware that large apps have some large pain points. Uber, Lyft, LinkedIn and others have written posts and given talks about this, so check those out and decide if it’s worth the trade-off.

Especially if you are starting with Swift 3, I think there’s a strong argument to use Swift despite the current shortcomings in tooling. The Swift team are aware and working hard on solving these problems.

Where To Go From Here?

And that concludes our Top App Dev Interview with Jesse Squires. Huge thanks to Jesse for sharing his work at Instagram, his love for Swift and finally running a successful blog.

We hope you enjoyed this inspiring interview and if you’re thinking of starting your own blog or wanting to start talking at conferences to take Jesse’s advice to heart.

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