Brent Simmons has been writing new code exclusively in Swift for a while now, and he recognizes omissions from the language that he still anticipates will be hard to overcome as Apple presumably moves toward incorporating Swift into its developer-facing frameworks. The Tension of Swift:

The Objective-C runtime allows AppKit and UIKit to provide some powerful features that I’d hate to do without: the Responder Chain, xib and storyboard loading, KVC, and the undo manager.

A key point he gets at is that however great Swift is, it’s only possible to use it to develop functional iOS and Mac apps because of the Objective C runtime still operating behind the scenes. Both AppKit and UIKit not only lean on the functionality of the runtime, but are designed with the runtime in mind.

Some major design priorities of the Swift language, namely type safety and compile time dependency binding, are at odds with the design priorities of 20 years of evolution in Apple’s frameworks. How and if that disparity will be reckoned by Apple remains to be seen.

I’m optimistic, because the Swift team has already made many concessions to make the language more compatible with the Objective C runtime. It strikes me as possibly non-optimal that a language that strikes the right compromise between Swift’s priorities and Objective C’s would start at the opposite extreme and work its way backwards, but that is what Apple seems to be doing.

Let’s hope they continue in that direction, and surprise us all with how well it all works out in the end.