I very much like the idea of a declarative definition of a user interface and thus I’m motivated to kick SwiftUI’s tires. Having worked halfway through the tutorials, I’m a little bit concerned about the scalability of SwiftUI. Sure, a DSL is always going to win the elevator pitch because it looks so nice and elegant.
At least the WWDC videos about SwiftUI that I have watched so far restrict themselves to more or less the bare minimum of complexity that you might want to add to the declarative definition of an app’s user interface. And already in the simple cases SwiftUI starts to get messy, e.g. with respect to formatting chained expressions1.
My (probably not very popular) point is that I personally believe that defining a scalable XML-based format will way more likely yield a good result than designing a DSL for the same purpose because scalability is already baked into XML itself. You can wrap tags around tags around tags real simple and the resulting complexity ist still kept under control.
In many cases, the problem is that the design of a DSL will start with the simple and elegant cases and stay with the simple and elegant cases for some time – until it needs to expand towards supporting higher-level complexity2. But: if the need for supporting higher-level complexity hasn’t been considered from the start than the DSL will fall apart pretty quickly.
To drive my point home, I have actually done some work in declarative UI definition in the Windows world, specifically the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)3. Microsoft uses a dialect of XML named XAML for the UI declaration.
I fully understand that XAML in particular has lots of problems and isn’t as much fun as you might want it to be. But still, given the choice between declaring a UI in an XML dialect or else by means of using a DSL (like SwiftUI) I would personally actually very likely prefer the XML.
- That does not even include the point where suddenly imperative paradigms are mixed into the declarative language. ↩
- Which – let’s face it – it will inevitably have to. ↩
- Yes, in a text editor. There is a graphical frontend for XAML. My experiences with the graphical frontend are staggering and I have yet to come across anyone seriously endorsing it. ↩