1st or 3rd party APIs for the win?

[rocketbro]

Can I ask a legitimate question as a budding developer- I love the work you guys are doing at Point Free but I am slightly nervous using your frameworks because they replace such core first party APIs (eg here, SwiftData).

Can you give me any advice as to how to balance choosing a first party API (which will likely have Apple's support for ages) vs something with a lot of optimizations I want but is made by a small company whose lives could change unpredictably and who may have to drop support?

Thanks for any insight from the team or community!

[stephencelis]

@rocketbro As it happens this is a topic related to a blog post we just published:

https://www.pointfree.co/blog/posts/189-open-source-case-study-listening-to-our-users

You must consider trade-offs with any dependency you choose for your app. With Apple in particular you are mostly stuck in an opaque, yearly release cycle that may or may not address bugs and other requirements you have. There's also no guarantee that Apple will continue to maintain and improve a particular framework (take Combine, for example).

With open source projects like ours, you have a public channel to communicate bugs, feature requests, and frequent updates that address both. Point-Free as a company may be smaller than Apple, but we have an 8+ year track record of shipping and maintaining many open source libraries, and we have a large community of contributors that are invested in our software and work with us to help improve our libraries. Another nice feature of open source is that all the code is publicly available to you and anyone else to maintain in the future should something happen.

[rocketbro]

Great post, and thanks for the quick reply. Literally the speed of your reply helps answer the question lol.

I will be digging into y'all's work more and will definitely be implementing in some of my projects

[mbrandonw]

It's also worth noting that SwiftData had only one major feature added to it between WWDC24 and WWDC25, which was allowing for inheritance. That's a long time to wait for a feature of dubious utility, and we have to wait another year to see what is in store for WWDC26. In general it's difficult to gauge just how supported a technology is from Apple since everything is such a blackbox.

Also, we were able to support inheritance-like patterns in SQL using enums and released it just a few weeks ago.