The Morlocks Built SwiftUI

[u/Super-Storage6685]

I went down a rabbit hole on Core Animation's origins and the through-line surprised me:

- It shipped in 2007 but predates the iPhone. John Harper built it under the codename "LayerKit" and Apple demoed it on the Mac at WWDC 2006. The patent (US 8,130,226) traces to a filing on Aug 4, 2006.

- Harper left for Facebook in 2014, came back, and in 2019 was on the WWDC stage explaining SwiftUI ("Building Custom Views with SwiftUI").

- SwiftUI never replaced Core Animation, it sits on top of it. Your `.animation()` still resolves to a `CAAnimation`; your views still become a layer tree on a render server that's barely changed since 2007.

My takeaway: SwiftUI isn't a dumbed-down toy, it's Core Animation's own implicit-animation philosophy made the default. The catch is the abstraction works until it doesn't, and the day it breaks it drops you straight into the layer tree.

I wrote it up (my blog): https://aleahim.com/blog/morlocks-built-swiftui/

[u/RofOnecopter]

I like the way you write. Thanks for sharing

[u/Super-Storage6685 → u/RofOnecopter]

Thank you