All the places Swift will go (Interview)

The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

This week we’re talking about Swift with Ben Cohen, the Swift Team Manager at Apple. We caught up with Ben while at KubeCon last week. Ben takes us into the world of Swift, from Apple Native apps on iOS and macOS, to the Swift Server Workgroup for developing and deploying server side applications, to the Swift extension for VS Code, Swift as a safe C/C++ successor language, Swift on Linux and Windows, and of course what The Browser Company’s Arc browser is doing to bring Arc to Windows.

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Sponsors:

• Statsig – Build faster with confidence. Startups to Fortune 500s rely on Statsig to make data-driven decisions. Ship smarter and faster with the unified platform for feature flags, experimentation, and analytics. Our listeners get free white-glove onboarding, migration support, and 5 million free events per month.
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• Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster!

Featuring:

• Ben Cohen – GitHub, Mastodon, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Swift is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux
• The Browser Company (who are bringing their Arc browser, written in Swift, to Windows) recently open sourced their bindings for WinRT
• The Swift on Server Working Group
• Swift extension for VS Code (if Xcode isn’t your thing)
• NSA recently published a report urging people to move off of C and C++:
• John McCall (who chairs the Language Steering Group) at CppNow recently
• The goals for Swift 6
• Miguel de Icaza proposing using Swift in the Godot game engine

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Capitole

1. This week on The Changelog (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: Statsig (00:01:11)

https://statsig.com/changelog

3. Start the show! (00:04:36)

4. Realizing the vision (00:07:48)

5. Swift as a language (00:09:46)

6. Swift on Windows and Linux (00:14:39)

7. Migrating to Swift (00:20:12)

8. Swift on Windows (00:22:29)

9. Sponsor: Neon (00:26:27)

https://neon.tech

10. Swift on Android and elsewhere? (00:31:48)

11. Swift vs Rust (00:35:06)

12. ABI stability (00:37:29)

13. Swift and memory management (00:42:59)

14. Swift ergonomics (00:45:16)

15. Swift and The Godot Engine? (00:49:58)

16. Coming up! (00:51:58)