An Approach for Migrating From Objective-C to Swift
It feels like Swift is pretty ubiquitous across the Apple ecosystem now, but there’s a lot of Objective-C out there. The larger and older the app, the more likely that there’s still a bunch of Objective-C powering various bits behind the scenes.
At my last job I worked on a fairly large iOS and tvOS app for nearly 4 years, during which time we transitioned almost the whole app to Swift. At least the first year was spent learning how not to do a language transition, during the second and third we figured things out and really hit our stride, and by the fourth we had something resembling a formalised approach.
I’ve realised that there’s a bunch of teams out there still maintaining Objective-C projects, and struggling to make much headway on a Swift transition. So in this post I’m going to tell you what I learned along the way.
It’s all relative, but if you work on an app with 2 or 3 developers then it probably looks monstrous. If you work at Netflix then it probably looks pretty small!
