I think swift is a really great language from the design perspective.
What makes it unusable outside the apple ecosystem imho is that while the C interop is amazing on paper, it sucks hard in practice due to the abomination of pointer types they build in.
The "all pointers are evil" attitude doesn't help when you want to use a C library and noone will write rewrite all these libraries.
Not to be that agentic coding guy, but I think this will become less of a problem than our historic biases suggest.
For context, I just built a streaming markdown renderer in Swift because there wasn’t an existing open source package that met my needs, something that would have taken me weeks/months previously (I’m not a Swift dev).
Porting all the C libraries you need isn’t necessarily an overnight task, but it’s no longer an insurmountable mountain in terms of dev time.
This is a very welcome improvement but I should note the title is a bit clickbaity: using Swift on e.g. Cursor was always possible, it's just that after Microsoft banned forks from accessing the official VSCode marketplace last year you started having to workaround it by downloading and installing the .vsix file manually. Having the extension on the Open VSX Registry sorts this out so you can now install it via the proper way once more. Very happy this finally happened!
This extension is for "pure" Swift development, not iOS development. I doubt the latter will ever officially happen. It's possible to make it work for iOS at an unofficial capacity though by hooking into the extension's LSP support. We did this at Spotify to enable iOS development in Cursor for Bazel iOS projects: https://github.com/spotify/sourcekit-bazel-bsp
You do need the Android SDK to build, Android Studio makes things easier (even though the Bazel IDE plugin is a whole other topic itself..) but isn't mandatory to develop or run your app.
That's just untrue on the face of it. All of the build tools are open and cross-platform. Is there a specific piece of Android Studio that you require for Android app development?
Not certain if this answers the question, but it seemed like you're generally expected to install Android Studio to get the correct build versions of all of the tools and libraries. I guess theoretically you could repackage them yourself, but also not entirely clear why you would—other than perhaps download size. The tools can be driven externally, once installed, but so could XCode projects (with `xcodebuild`).
This is not an expectation, no. Libraries are managed via Gradle or whatever build system you use. Android-specific host tools are Gradle-managed, installed via the sdkmanager tool, or managed via other means; I maintain a repository to install them via Nix [0], and many Linux distributions package them. The Android Studio IDE is not required, and doing so would pretty much break everyone's CI setup.
Incorrect. You can (if you really want to) build an Android app without having any Google tools.
But even if you don't want to do any crazy stuff, Android SDK itself is just a bunch of Gradle scripts and Java apps. You can download and install them without any GUI in the way.
Sorry, but Android and iOS are simply incomparable in their quality. Android SDK is a high-quality tool for developers that provides all the expected interfaces.
iOS SDK is a lock-in GUI hell that requires you to use a shitty macOS-only tool to even _upload_ apps to Apple Store. Never mind doing headless builds in CI/CD. Why that tool is shitty? It uses its own protocol for upload and doesn't do proper PMTU, so if you have a misconfigured MTU somewhere in the chain between you and Apple, uploads will just silently hang.
Just to nit pick a bit, that link is for Android Studio and downloads from the "Google for Developers" website, then instructs how to install and manage the the command line tools using the GUI
> Because nobody use Swift outside of iOS app development
Because that isn't true, people do use it outside of iOS app dev, and is becoming more true as time goes on to boot.
It's also a chicken-and-egg problem: no one will use Swift for non-iOS tasks if the tooling support isn't there. The more investment into it, the more it will be picked up for other tasks.
But it's been used outside of Apple-specific things since the early days in various niches.
Now if only they'd open up iOS development so we can get AppCode back.
The primary thing keeping me away from trying it again is I have to use Xcode instead of my beloved JetBrains IDEs where I know all the keyboard shortcuts.
Is there an open—source Swift IDE that can modify itself without restarting? (written in Swift) I loved Oberon µSystems Oberon/F aka Component Pascal for that capability.
[1]: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22150-noctule-the-swift...
What makes it unusable outside the apple ecosystem imho is that while the C interop is amazing on paper, it sucks hard in practice due to the abomination of pointer types they build in.
The "all pointers are evil" attitude doesn't help when you want to use a C library and noone will write rewrite all these libraries.
For context, I just built a streaming markdown renderer in Swift because there wasn’t an existing open source package that met my needs, something that would have taken me weeks/months previously (I’m not a Swift dev).
Porting all the C libraries you need isn’t necessarily an overnight task, but it’s no longer an insurmountable mountain in terms of dev time.
“You’re looking at a multi-week refactor” aaaaand it’s done
Swift Caching Compiler - https://github.com/jrz/tools
I made an example of an iOS/Android monorepo with a shared Rust core a few months ago: https://github.com/Antonito/bazel-app-core-native-example/
You do need the Android SDK to build, Android Studio makes things easier (even though the Bazel IDE plugin is a whole other topic itself..) but isn't mandatory to develop or run your app.
[0]: https://github.com/tadfisher/android-nixpkgs
https://developer.android.com/studio#command-line-tools-only
But even if you don't want to do any crazy stuff, Android SDK itself is just a bunch of Gradle scripts and Java apps. You can download and install them without any GUI in the way.
This is very common in CI/CD environments. Google provides a handy tool for that: https://developer.android.com/tools
Sorry, but Android and iOS are simply incomparable in their quality. Android SDK is a high-quality tool for developers that provides all the expected interfaces.
iOS SDK is a lock-in GUI hell that requires you to use a shitty macOS-only tool to even _upload_ apps to Apple Store. Never mind doing headless builds in CI/CD. Why that tool is shitty? It uses its own protocol for upload and doesn't do proper PMTU, so if you have a misconfigured MTU somewhere in the chain between you and Apple, uploads will just silently hang.
Edit: D'Oh, the correct URL for the sdkmanager is: https://developer.android.com/tools/sdkmanager
Because that isn't true, people do use it outside of iOS app dev, and is becoming more true as time goes on to boot.
It's also a chicken-and-egg problem: no one will use Swift for non-iOS tasks if the tooling support isn't there. The more investment into it, the more it will be picked up for other tasks.
But it's been used outside of Apple-specific things since the early days in various niches.
Also I build extra tooling to facilitate iOS development in VSCode https://github.com/sweetpad-dev/sweetpad
The primary thing keeping me away from trying it again is I have to use Xcode instead of my beloved JetBrains IDEs where I know all the keyboard shortcuts.
Or am I going to have to vibe-code one.