RIBs VS swift-composable-architecture

At a minimum, Composable Architecture, and now Dependencies from Point-Free.

I’ve built a couple of apps with this framework: https://github.com/pointfreeco/swift-composable-architecture

load("@bazel_tools//tools/build_defs/repo:http.bzl", "http_archive") http_archive( name = "com_github_buildbuddy_io_rules_xcodeproj", sha256 = "564381b33261ba29e3c8f505de82fc398452700b605d785ce3e4b9dd6c73b623", url = "https://github.com/buildbuddy-io/rules_xcodeproj/releases/download/0.9.0/release.tar.gz", ) http_archive( name = "cgrindel_rules_spm", sha256 = "03718eb865a100ba4449ebcbca6d97bf6ea78fa17346ce6d55532312e8bf9aa8", strip_prefix = "rules_spm-0.11.0", url = "https://github.com/cgrindel/rules_spm/archive/v0.11.0.tar.gz", ) load( "@cgrindel_rules_spm//spm:defs.bzl", "spm_pkg", "spm_repositories", ) load( "@cgrindel_rules_spm//spm:deps.bzl", "spm_rules_dependencies", ) spm_rules_dependencies() load( "@com_github_buildbuddy_io_rules_xcodeproj//xcodeproj:repositories.bzl", "xcodeproj_rules_dependencies", ) xcodeproj_rules_dependencies() load( "@build_bazel_rules_apple//apple:repositories.bzl", "apple_rules_dependencies", ) apple_rules_dependencies() load( "@build_bazel_rules_swift//swift:repositories.bzl", "swift_rules_dependencies", ) swift_rules_dependencies() load( "@build_bazel_rules_swift//swift:extras.bzl", "swift_rules_extra_dependencies", ) swift_rules_extra_dependencies() load( "@build_bazel_apple_support//lib:repositories.bzl", "apple_support_dependencies", ) apple_support_dependencies() spm_repositories( name = "swift_pkgs", platforms = [ ".macOS(.v10_15)", ], dependencies = [ spm_pkg( url = "https://github.com/apple/swift-log.git", exact_version = "1.4.2", products = ["Logging"], ), spm_pkg( url = "https://github.com/pointfreeco/swift-composable-architecture.git", exact_version = "0.43.0", products = ["ComposableArchitecture"], ), spm_pkg( name = "Bow", url = "https://github.com/bow-swift/bow.git", exact_version = "0.8.0", products = ["Bow", "BowEffects", "BowOptics"], ), spm_pkg( url = "https://github.com/grpc/grpc-swift.git", exact_version = "1.7.3", products = ["GRPC"], ), spm_pkg( url = "https://github.com/hyperoslo/Cache", exact_version = "6.0.0", products = ["Cache"], ), ], )

I’m fairly exclusive to https://github.com/pointfreeco/swift-composable-architecture. There is a learning curve to get started but I really enjoy working with it.

Look into some of the architectural patterns out there, find one that makes sense to you, and use that to build your app. For example, check out the Composable Architecture, Clean Architecture, VIPER, MVVM.

You can find out more about it here.

If you're interested in SwiftUI and care about feature composability, decent test coverage, dependency injection, isolated side effects, functional core and being able to use live previews properly, take a look at: https://github.com/pointfreeco/swift-composable-architecture

Been using it at work for a moderately complex app (not a toy app by any means) and it's been fantastic. We're 7 months in and haven't hit any gotchas, but the learning curve can be a bit steep, especially for more junior iOS devs.

Helps that they have a full video series taking you through the library and how they built it: https://www.pointfree.co/collections/composable-architecture

One point that's not being discussed enough -- using SwiftUI (since it's heavily value-typed / struct-based) prevents a whole host of problems around retain cycles, typically the bugbear of iOS dev. I recently built an iOS app from scratch with recent grads with zero Swift experience (but had done React).

It was ~2mo before they even had to learn what a retain cycle was, and that was from using UIKit.

Of course you still eventually see this if / when you use `@ObservedObjects` and their implementation, but in our case we were also using https://github.com/pointfreeco/swift-composable-architecture which hides this away as well.

There’s a nice open source swift library by the pointfree guys, called The Composable Architecture (TCA). Check it out 🙂