Getting Swifty - A Tale from the Front Lines of Breaking Changes and Legacy Code

Explore a conference talk detailing the challenges and strategies of integrating Swift into an existing Objective-C codebase. Learn about the process of adopting a new programming language alongside legacy code, including interoperability issues, managing breaking changes, and balancing new features with legacy support. Discover how this transition impacted coding styles, shifting towards more composition and less inheritance, and gain insights into the long-term benefits of modernizing a large-scale mobile development project.

Syllabus

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE ENTERPRISE CONFERENCE
In the beginning there was... Objective-C for 30+ years
And then there was... Swift out of nowhere
The Situation 100's of thousands of lines of Obj-C split between 8 apps & 6 shared libraries
Crawl, Walk, Run Started learning Swift 2 around January 2016
Interop, It Just Works... Swift.h & Bridging-Header.h
Interop, I Just Works All of the coolest features don't bridge
Shim All The Things Dope new features or legacy support? False dichotomy.
The Great Migration - Skipped right over Swift 2.3
Go Forth and Swift Some More 2-1 year later and a painful migration behind us
The Payoff Our coding style has changed - More composition, less inheritance
Happily Ever After