I'm necroing this thread so that our new engineers can see it. The product expectation is that we drop new feature development for iOS 6 when the following features are in production:
- Lead images - Wikidata descriptions from mobileview - Search improvements - Supplement prefix search with fulltext search results - Wikidata descriptions from PageTerms - Read more - Three suggestions from fulltext search backend at the bottom of every article - Collapsing tables and infoboxes - Rollup disambiguation and pages issues into buttons underneath the lead image Dan On 12 November 2014 at 22:05, Dan Garry <dga...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > *tl;dr: The programming language used to develop new features by our iOS > app engineering team is changing from Objective C to Swift at some point in > the near future.* > > When making a native app, the language you have to implement the app in is > chosen by the third party responsible for the platform. For iOS apps, Apple > chose Objective C to be the language the app is written in. Objective C is > a... very strange language. It has a lot of quirks that slow down > development. > > To solve the above problem, you can now write apps in a new language > called Swift. Notably, Swift has features that make it less error prone and > more concise than Objective C, which should increase our velocity of > feature development. Swift is also much more readable and in-line with > other languages, which lowers the barrier of entry (which is currently very > high with Objective C). > > Importantly, Objective C and Swift can live alongside each other. So, when > we "switch to Swift" we do not need to rewrite all of our existing code > from Objective C to Swift. Instead, we can just start developing new > features using Swift, and slowly rewrite the old code from Objective C into > Swift as time allows. > > On the downsides, Swift is only supported on iOS 7 and above. iOS 6 only > represents around 5% of our user base, and we can pin iOS 6 users to the > last version of the app we released before we used Swift. We need to decide > what the last set of features we're want in that build are before we switch. > > Here are our next steps: > > - Evaluate more concretely whether Swift actually fits our needs or > not. [Engineering] > - Decide last set of features for our iOS 6 build. [Product/Design] > > Thanks, > Dan > > -- > Dan Garry > Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps > Wikimedia Foundation > -- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps Wikimedia Foundation
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