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  • I am building the backend of a social media app I am making in Swift. I've previously used Vapor for the web server but right now, I am trying out Hummimgbird.

    Has anyone tried either? Would love to hear your experience with them.

    by busymom0
  • Anyone have experience with embedded Swift or know any interesting embedded projects running on Swift?
    by asimovDev
  • One fun example is this Playdate game: https://news.play.date/news/four-corners-swift/

    Here's a more comprehensive list of different platform examples: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-embedded-examples

    by timsneath
  • I really hope the debugger improvements are noticeable. The number of times I've stopped in a debugger and I can't see the variables I want to look at has been extremely high.
    by boxed
  • Huh I thought I just didn't know what I was doing
    by skylurk
  • it's surprising how often this has been an issue. given up on it a long time ago. now old school print statements instead. seem to work better anyway. the debugger isn't slowing the app down.
    by mpalczewski
  • Since the release of Swift. :|
    by tarentel
  • This is a very impressive release. The continued type checker improvements are amazing, improved memory safety helping to expose hidden traps, improved debugging, improved dev experience for Android. Great job!
    by myHNAccount123
  • Man I can't count the number of shell wrappers I've written or reached out to over my career. Looking forward to having an official Swift SubProcess helper.
    by elpakal
  • Its really a shame Swift had to be the Apple language, it is really very nicely made
    by Ta_Panters
  • This is a troll comment considering the post is all about Swift’s portability on other platforms.
    by mrtesthah
  • I think a lot of the cross-platform interest from other companies diminished after features like result builders were quietly dropped in to support SwiftUI, with the usual community review process happening after it was already revealed at WWDC and shipping in Xcode (!). It's clear that Apple runs the show, and like Objective-C, it seems destined to be primarily an Apple language for Apple platforms and tools.
    by vor_
  • As a coder of 30+ years in various other languages that sincerely wants to learn Swift can someone please help me understand why it is not diametrically opposed for a company to suggest, effectively in the same breath no less, that I should learn to code Swift myself and/or just have some AI do it?

    Every time I set out to learn I just feel like I'm being an idiot because in a year, or now, nobody will hand code anything. And even if we still reckon that some knowledge will be required to verify the voluminous output of AI there is now a vast moat of Jr. unemployability that has arisen making it exponentially harder to justify learning to code in the first place?

    groan

    by lemonginger
  • If you have that much experience, swift is probably just a mix of what you already know? Do a couple of tutorials and then you are ready to vibe it.

    It's the people who haven't done the grind of learning a new language so have the problem, since LLM will give them solutions but not experience.

    by lordnacho
  • Yes to the subprocess 1.0. CommandLine utils are how I try out any new language. I feel like Swift hits the sweet spot for me in terms of safety, cross platform capability, ahead of time compilation, and automatic memory management compared to other languages currently available.
    by Decabytes
  • I didn’t realise Swift in WebAssembly has come as far as it has. I’ll be interested to try it out, I’ve used Rust before now but Swift is definitely easier to work with.
    by afavour
  • Goodnotes is already doing it. Their web app runs a large amount of the same Swift code used by their iOS app inside the browser through WebAssembly.
    by pwython
  • Happy to see Swift progress. Its a beautiful language and well thought out. Would love to see it expand outside of iOS
    by bnchrch
  • You can use it on macOS, iPadOS, watchOS and tvOS as well. Oh, and visionOS, at least for now.
    by steve1977
  • Except for the rules around init
    by bartvk
  • Beautiful? Just the number of keywords and reserved words and compiler attributes makes it very ugly to me. There are so many ways to do things (and if SwiftUI is involved I can expect a significant subset to... just not work - but I don't think that's the language's fault).
    by chairhairair
  • I love the friendly competition between Swift, Rust and Zig. Swift has been adding borrow checking features for a while, now they also have arenas, better C interop and more language support for non GC platforms.
    by tancop
  • A very solid release with very nice immediate conveniences/improvements and foundational long term work.

    I’m particularly impressed at the team’s continued investment in non-Apple platforms. IMO, true cross platform Swift codebases still seems out of reach for most shops. But if they keep this up for a few more years then Swift could become a very compelling cross platform language — for both systems and application programming.

    The big hurdle they need to figure out is the standard library and especially SwiftUI. SwiftUI is the single most important library that essentially all Apple swift codebases use, so until there is a real cross platform SwiftUI then for app programming IMO Swift will remain a novelty.

    There are other frameworks, like eg Network.framework, which really should be in the stdlib as well.

    by airstrafer
  • “Novelty” is a stretch. There’s a lot of headless code in the world.
    by pohl
  • The opensource cross-platform equivalent, but not drop-in, alternative of Network.framework is https://github.com/apple/swift-network-evolution, which re-implements much of the API surface from scratch, including QUIC.
    by hazira
  • I think cross-platform Swift is likely to always be a niche like it was with Objective-C. Apple has too much control over the language and too much of a vested interest in retaining that control and modifying the language for its own needs. E.g., the stuff that got shoved in to support SwiftUI with none of the typical review processes until AFTER Apple had already built a shipping framework on it. It was around that time IBM announced it was abandoning server-side Swift as well.
    by vor_
  • SwiftUI is Apple secret sauce. That’s never going to be released.

    All the compiler features are there. Others can make similar libraries or other new libraries.

    But I don’t see why Apple would ever release that outside Apple land. Swift can still be used for shared logic and server stuff and command line tools and GUIs using other libraries.

    by MBCook