Swift Thoughts

03 Nov 2014 • wanderingcoder.net

Little did I know that not only Swift method calls are not more dynamic than Objective-C method calls, but in fact don’t use objc_msgSend() at all by default! Look, objc_msgSend() (and friends) is the whole point of the Objective-C runtime. Period. Everything else is bookkeeping in support of objc_msgSend(). Swift can call into objc_msgSend() when calling Objective-C methods and Swift methods marked objc.

But using this to proclaim that Swift “uses the same runtime as Objective-C” amounts to telling Python uses the same runtime as Objective-C because of the Python-Cocoa bridge and NSObject-derived Python objects. Apple is trying to convince us of the Objective-C-minus-the-C-part lineage of Swift, but the truth is that Swift has very little to do with that, and much more to do, semantically, with C++. This would never have happened had Avie Tevanian still been working at Apple.

The “using the same runtime” bit does seem to be a bit of a stretch.