I had a similar experience as the blog post author. I spent many hours battling generics and the huge forest of (undocumented) protocols to do something seemingly trivial. I just gave up rather than try to pin down exactly what was wrong in a long and detailed blog post.
The prevailing answer to everything seem to be: Write a bug report to Apple and use Objective-C (or Swift's UnsafePointer and related).
This ignores what I think really is the issue here: Swift has an overly complex type system. This picture:
Tells a lot. And this is from unofficial documentation that has been generated from Swift libraries. When you read the documentation Apple provides there is little explanation of this huge protocol hierarchy and the rationale behind it.
It seems to me that: Swift has been released in a rush with bugs even in the core language and compiler. Lacking documentation. And of course even a larger number of bugs in the IDE support, debugging etc.
Secondly: Swift battles the problem of easy-to-understand typesafe generics like so many other languages only it has it much worse: It carries a lot of stuff from Objective-C and it has to support easy interoperability. Plus it has ideas like not allowing implicit conversion of number types (requiring an integer added to a double to be explicitly converted to a double) causing the big type system to show it's messy head again and again.
I really want to love Swift but it will take years for Swift to be as clean and productive as Objective-C.
I my opinion what Apple should have done was to create the "CoffeeScript" of Objective-C. A language that essentially was Objective-C in terms of language features but with a concise syntax.
I had a similar experience as the blog post author. I spent many hours battling generics and the huge forest of (undocumented) protocols to do something seemingly trivial. I just gave up rather than try to pin down exactly what was wrong in a long and detailed blog post.
The prevailing answer to everything seem to be: Write a bug report to Apple and use Objective-C (or Swift's UnsafePointer and related).
This ignores what I think really is the issue here: Swift has an overly complex type system. This picture:
http://swiftdoc.org/type/Int/hierarchy/
Tells a lot. And this is from unofficial documentation that has been generated from Swift libraries. When you read the documentation Apple provides there is little explanation of this huge protocol hierarchy and the rationale behind it.
It seems to me that: Swift has been released in a rush with bugs even in the core language and compiler. Lacking documentation. And of course even a larger number of bugs in the IDE support, debugging etc.
Secondly: Swift battles the problem of easy-to-understand typesafe generics like so many other languages only it has it much worse: It carries a lot of stuff from Objective-C and it has to support easy interoperability. Plus it has ideas like not allowing implicit conversion of number types (requiring an integer added to a double to be explicitly converted to a double) causing the big type system to show it's messy head again and again.
I really want to love Swift but it will take years for Swift to be as clean and productive as Objective-C.
I my opinion what Apple should have done was to create the "CoffeeScript" of Objective-C. A language that essentially was Objective-C in terms of language features but with a concise syntax.