Expanding Swift's IDE Support

https://swift.org/blog/expanding-swift-ide-support/

by frizlab • 4 months ago

138 68 4 months ago

swift.org

jgbuddy• 4 months ago

This is huge, long time coming. Interested to see if there is SwiftUI support.

nielsbot• 4 months ago

What type of support do you mean? Language checking? Live previews?

rockbruno2• 4 months ago

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

worldsavior• 4 months ago

You also can't do Android (app) development outside Android Studio.

QQ00• 4 months ago

What's the point then? Because nobody use Swift outside of iOS app development.

hyzyla• 4 months ago

No so straightforward, but there is project that parses xcodebuild logs and pass them to lsp to provide LSP for SwiftUI projects https://github.com/SolaWing/xcode-build-server

Also I build extra tooling to facilitate iOS development in VSCode https://github.com/sweetpad-dev/sweetpad

sunnybeetroot• 4 months ago

Thanks for your great work on sweetpad. I’ve always been a bit curious where the name came from though.

pezgrande• 3 months ago

I hate that I need to create an Apple account (with email and phone verification) just to be able download the sdk to use MacOS APIs. To make things worse I tried for like one hour to create an account and couldn't because for some reason I was no receiving the verification email.

rockbruno2• 4 months ago

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!

MaysonL• 4 months ago

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.

Or am I going to have to vibe-code one.

rafram• 4 months ago

That is a very specific set of requirements. I doubt it.

mckn1ght• 4 months ago

If you could reimplement Emacs in Swift that’d be great

castral• 4 months ago

The loss of AppCode from Jetbrains was a huge blow to my motivation to continue working with Swift. Xcode just can't compare.

bmc7505• 3 months ago

I've recently been using this plugin [1], which is still under development but is an adequate stopgap until a better solution comes along.

[1] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/22150-noctule-the-swift...

pjmlp2• 3 months ago

Apparently most folks were happy enough with XCode and didn't bother to buy AppCode licenses, hence why JetBrains gave up on it.

hbn• 4 months ago

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.

randomNumber73• 4 months ago

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.

tracymiranda• 4 months ago

Some recent fixes went into 6.2.3 which really help with C interop, this post shows what that looks like in practice https://www.swift.org/blog/improving-usability-of-c-librarie...

frizlab3• 4 months ago

yup, it got much better recently

randomNumber73• 3 months ago

These look mostly like toy examples where the type of the pointer can be inferred from the return values of the functions.

How do I call this function in swift?

SDL_AudioSpec* SDL_LoadWAV_RW(SDL_RWops * src, int freesrc, SDL_AudioSpec * spec, Uint8 * * audio_buf, Uint32 * audio_len);

jumploops2• 4 months ago

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.

MattDamonSpace• 4 months ago

My favorite part is the AI will still estimate projects in human-time.

“You’re looking at a multi-week refactor” aaaaand it’s done

buzzerbetrayed• 3 months ago

Very high quality comment that is being downvoted unfairly because it defends AI. HN is on the wrong side of history on this one.

randomNumber73• 3 months ago

It's not necessary to rewrite perfectly fine libraries written by exceptional programmers. And whoever thinks it is an easy task (sorry rust guys) is severely suffering from the dunning-kruger effect.

vyr• 4 months ago

i was hoping this was going to be AppCode rising from the grave but nah it's just more rebranded versions of VSCode. nothing new here

bartekpacia• 3 months ago

The free Kotlin Multiplatorm plugin provides 1st class Swift support in IntelliJ IDEA. It’s heavily based on old AppCode codebase.

pharaohgeek• 3 months ago

As I understand it, though, it's really not well suited to server-side Swift development. Doesn't leverage SPM, requires Xcode, etc. I'd LOVE a revival of AppCode (or Swift support in CLion) that would facilitate server-side Swift development.

jbverschoor2• 4 months ago

Use swift as a scripting language without the slow start time:

Swift Caching Compiler - https://github.com/jrz/tools

frizlab3• 3 months ago

Is “$0” (`argv[0]`) correct when the pre-compiled binary is launched instead of the script?

jbverschoor2• 3 months ago

Ahh good question. I had to think a while before I understood what you meant. Let me check when I can.

Nice catch.

edit: you are right. The binary version will result in a different argv[0]. Not sure what'd the best solution would be. Hardcoding doesn't make sense, as symlinks also change argv[0], so overriding is not the way to go.

aabhay• 3 months ago

We’ve used SweetPad and it worked fine for us, so this doesn’t change much.

inatreecrown2• 3 months ago

I recently started to enjoy working in Xcode more than before, using Swift. Not sure what changed, but it seems more responsive for lack of a better expression.

frizlab3• 3 months ago

Little by little, Xcode is making progress. Probably a lot of the improvements come from the open-source and actual work on its build system… It’s still far from perfect, but at least it’s getting better.

w10-12• 3 months ago

TLDR: same VScode extension now listed on OpenVSX registry, for Eclipse Theia et al.

But it's unclear if they tested it. For me, it fails basic configuration steps on the simplest project. Plugin compatibility between VSCode and others seems iffy.

Couple this with Xcode 26.4 AI lacking agentic features and you get Swift programmers being left behind.

rescripting2• 3 months ago

In what way does it fail?

w10-12• 3 months ago

Package introspection fails with an error that there are other swiftpm processes running when there aren't in a clean project with no .folders - probably a race with itself. That means no automatic configuration for tests or executables, debugging, etc. Just "build all"

inunuftbkj2• 3 months ago

Couple this with Xcode 26.4 AI lacking agentic features

A blessing, some might argue.

wiseowise2• 3 months ago

Everyone should post to open-vsx by default.

eptcyka• 3 months ago

But can I develop iOS apps with vim? As in, easy to execute commands for debugging, running app and tests?

micampe• 3 months ago

If you’re willing to try Neovim I’ve been using xcodebuild.nvim for a couple of years (for macOS not iOS, but they’re both supported).

https://github.com/wojciech-kulik/xcodebuild.nvim

fingerlocks2• 3 months ago

Yes, But an iOS app requires a helluva lot more than just the Swift language. For example, Metal has zero support so you have to use ft=cpp and disable lsp diagnostics. And you can completely forget Xcode’s wonderful Metal debugger entirely.

Otherwise swift works just like any other clang/llvm project and the tooling is basically the same.

jadar• 3 months ago

Yes but most people are not dropping down to Metal support unless they're doing custom effects or developing a game engine. Most apps could be developed outside of Xcode just fine.

pjmlp2• 3 months ago

Yes, provided you are running vim on macOS, and calling into the xcode command line tooling.

mohsen1• 3 months ago

I'm building iOS apps without opening Xcode. All in VSCode and CLI build tools. This is excellent!

Expanding Swift's IDE Support

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