PureBasic Forums - English

Since my first post in this thread more than three years ago, the preferred native languages for mobile development have shifted away from Java and Objective-C, to Kotlin and Swift for the Android and iOS platforms respectively.

Fairly new languages, but they have since been firmly integrated into Android Studio and Xcode, and they have matured significantly as app development languages for their respective mobile platforms.

While their predecessors utilised cryptic syntax and complicated structures, each different as night and day, Kotlin and Swift have simplified and bridged the syntax gap, appearing and functioning very similar to each other, thus lowering the bar on code portability, and they have also improved their functional structures to simple and concise implementations. One might go so far to say that they're almost as easy as BASIC.

The native development tools (Android Studio & Xcode) are free for both personal and enterprise use, and the web is now choc-full of resources supporting these languages. Both IDEs offer various app templates to start with, code completion, hints and live error-checking, and both include simple and intuitive drag-and-drop interface builders.

So, rather than get bogged down with third-party RAD tools and libraries that limit features and functionalities, with even less support resources, it might be best to stick to these platform-recommended tools which are full-featured and well-supported.

IMHO, of course.

I wouldn't say Swift is easy & basic like...

Certainly not while it changed all the time during the last few years and developers were apparently OK by being a beta user for years while Obj-C was there all the time with a proven and stable framework. Objective-C still is viable imho and frequently faster than Swift because way less abstraction layers. You just have to understand memory alloc/deloc. What else is new? I can tell because I just recently read a lot about Obj-C which is c with a message framework on top. What makes or breaks a platform are the libraries/frameworks. Cocoa in that regard is rock solid and feature rich and developed to be handled by Obj-C. Anyway, it shows that many Apple devs just walk wherever Apple wants them to. Even if that means rebuilding your app 10 times because Swift again changes lot's of stuff Crazy.

Anyway, many devs praise B4A for being way more efficient and straight forward to use than the Java madness. Kotlinn newness IDK about.

Swift has a lot of object oriented whistles which for someone coming from PB would be a pain to handle and understand. Heck, I, with OOP 'education' gets also dizzy of all function creep in modern languages. Swift tries to be everything to everyone and fails having a unique selling point. Up to now it's only in use on mac platforms too.

It takes time to learn how to use a language in the right way and more time to get to know the supporting frameworks. Playing around a bit is always possible, but to really start to use it takes a lot of effort and practice and time... So choose wisely