What are some big hurdles you faced going into SwiftUI?

[GalCohen]

I'm evaluating SwiftUI. I'm not here to ask "is it production ready?". I think that question is a bit too broad and probably depends on the actual app one may be building. So my question is - when you adopted SwiftUI, what are some really big hurdles you hit that really slowed you down, that forced you into nasty hacks, or back into UIKit?

In the end, we'll probably end up taking a piecemeal approach, writing new, small, less risky components in it first, until we build up our skills and confidence in it, but I'm looking for a clearer picture of the limitations before we dive in. For example, I heard someone once say "Use SwiftUI for views, but use UIKit for navigation, because it's still buggy and limited." (I don't know if that's true! Maybe last year, maybe in the betas - I'm just giving an example). Another one might be lack of UITextView's features support? Links, attributed text, etc. So what are some places you found yourselves stuck in some deep holes, and what did it take for you to get out? How about things that are difficult in supporting both iOS 14 and 13?

PS - Reading through this wishlist post was helpful in identifying some areas #4

[sindresorhus]

Bugs and crashes. The biggest problems I had were crashes inside the native components used internally by SwiftUI. For example, I use a List, and in some cases it crashes SwiftUI's NSOutlineView subclass used internally by List. SwiftUI is great when it works, but it makes it almost impossible to work around bugs in the framework. I also experienced a lot of "AttributeGraph inconsistency" errors coming from SwiftUI. NavigationLink/NavigationView was also unusable until iOS 14 and it still is buggy. I'm personally still staying away from navigation in SwiftUI, not just because it's buggy, but also because I don't particularly like the current design. Missing features I have usually managed to work around by making a gadzillion AppKit/UIKit view representable wrappers. I also had some pretty serious memory leaks (FB7539293 and some more unreported issues) which were really hard to work around. At some point, I had to just force my long-running app to restart once a day when the user was not interacting with the app.

It's possible to support both iOS 13 and iOS 14, but iOS 14 fixed a lot of nasty bugs and added a bunch of useful components, so if you are going all in on SwiftUI, I would personally target iOS 14 to lessen the pain.

This might sound a little negative, but know that I love SwiftUI and it was worth all the problems. My code is much shorter, better, and less buggy because of SwiftUI and compared to my old AppKit/UIKit code.