Upgrade to a more modern language - lol

[philipturner]

I challenge you to find whether translating to Swift brings a performance cost.

Seriously, I appreciate your work on optimizing Apple stuff, but I thought I'd do this just for kicks. It's a (hopefully) zero-cost literal translation from Objective-C to Swift, which I have a ton of experience with. I didn't mess with the compiled executable or podspec file.

Please tell me what you think about it!

[michaeleisel]

I imagine this is indeed the same performance. The reason I did it in ObjC is because of all the bit-munging that's going on here, that I can more easily and explicitly do in C. I'm ambivalent about merging this, but we can see what other people think.

[michaeleisel]

To be clear, I do appreciate your enthusiasm for writing modern code, and the code looks generally solid :)

[philipturner]

For reference, I have avoided Objective-C since I started working with iOS. I created a lot of low-level code in Swift, learning how to do pointer arithmetic, forced inlining, bit casting, etc. without going to C or Objective-C. It took me around 30 minutes to translate your code to Swift.

Since you are maintaining the code, you would have to learn all the stuff I just listed above, which does take time. I know that it may be more productive for you to stay with Objective-C, but I was just curious what you would say. However, the moment when you actually get it to work in Swift feels super amazing.

[philipturner]

Have you looked at the utility functions in ARHeadsetKit?

[philipturner]

If the Objective-C -> Swift translation is actually implemented, the best option would be that you use my fork as a reference, but translate it to Swift yourself. I didn't really study what your code does, or if the translated code even works. I wouldn't be comfortable replacing my own code with something another person made, without at least thoroughly examining and testing it.

[philipturner]

I would be honored to assist you in transferring to/maintaining this repository in Swift. I’m open 24/7 and eager to help with anything that gets rid of Objective-C!

[michaeleisel]

I'm going to close for now. I've done bit-munging in Swift before, and that's not really the issue. The issue is how well-suited C is to it. Also, ObjC dependencies can be easier to integrate. For example, despite its claims of module stability (with the right flags), in practice I've seen bugs with Swift module stability, preventing one from vendoring it as a standalone library.

[philipturner]

Sorry about my past rudeness. Your work here was great.

[michaeleisel]

No worries