Saleem Abdulrasool

@ShikiSuen @bengi_dev @SwiftLang I’ve worked on Swift for Android and other platforms as well :) You are correct that the package is platform agnostic.

@bengi_dev @compnerd @SwiftLang Your initial question is invalid. Compnerd solely works on Swift for Windows. This package is platform-neutral. It's not making a sense to talk about "whether it can be used with UIKit or some sort of Apple XXXXkit", because answers of such questions will always be true.

Thanks to @compnerd, we have a new Swift XML parser! 🌿 Xylem is pure Swift, zero dependencies, covering SAX, DOM, and XPath 1.0. This is the kind of infrastructure work that helps Swift thrive everywhere! 🎉 forums.swift.org/t/xylem-a-pure…

@bengi_dev @SwiftLang No, this has nothing to do with SwiftUI, it is just a standalone XML parser.

@SwiftLang @compnerd is this just for SwiftUI?

@yukkuri_lab @bitsydoge @bztree @tsoding @clattner_llvm These are the common controls from windows, with the updated manifest for the latest version. I think that it’s more that it is the traditional Win32 rather than the XAML based UI like in WinUI.

@bitsydoge @bztree @tsoding @clattner_llvm Im old enough to remember Win32 GUI. It was ugly, but not that much. 🤔

Didn't know you can do this in Swift 😮 F*cking beautiful and simple. No stupid prefixes in C interop. Thanks to @tsoding for discovering that (and probably to @clattner_llvm for designing that feature).

@rsms @awesomekling @ladybirdbrowser You can always cross compile. The compiler builds and runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows. At @browsercompany we are working on cross compilation from Windows to other environments including Android. Building any modern C++ compiler for a new system is likely as involved IMO.

Isn’t it going to make it harder to build ladybird on new systems? AFAIK the Swift compiler toolchain is massive. We looked at Swift for Playbit maybe two years ago and I couldn’t figure out how to get hello world working as all i was able to find was a toolchain for Ubuntu-like systems (ie with expectations on specific shared libraries available on the system.) A simple test would be to compile hello world on Android — there’s no glibc or Ubuntu-compatible dynamic loader, so would be a good proxy for “is swift portable?” Or FreeBSD

There have been some claims that we're now going to "disappear for years to rewrite all of @ladybirdbrowser in Swift".. Of course, we don't have time for that. We're trying to build something real and get an alpha version ready in 2026! However, we do see tremendous value in the safety and concurrency properties of Swift 6.0, so we will be adopting it incrementally in our codebase, with a focus on security-sensitive areas first, such as parsing, networking, etc. Our bet is that this will be possible thanks to the investment into C++ interop that the Swift team has made and continues to make.

@hursh @Ramborambowski @awesomekling @ladybirdbrowser @SwiftLang @browsercompany It depends on @Ramborambowski's goals; the swappable RT would allow you to build with a custom C++ runtime but wouldn't integrate into the system as well. That is joint work between @hypst, @egor_zhdan, and myself. Can point you to the PRs if you want.

@Ramborambowski @awesomekling @ladybirdbrowser @SwiftLang @browsercompany We’ve also been working on swappable std libs for c++ if that’s helpful! @compnerd can probably say more and give some pointers to that work if helpful!

@hursh @awesomekling @ladybirdbrowser @SwiftLang @browsercompany I'm keeping a list here of the current issues. github.com/LadybirdBrowse… Getting my swift llvm-project backport and my libstdc++ overlay workaround in Swift itself merged would be the highest impact to recommending nightlies from swiftly for Linux devs on Ubuntu 22.04.

We've been evaluating a number of C++ successor languages for @ladybirdbrowser, and the one best suited to our needs appears to be @SwiftLang 🪶 Over the last few months, I've asked a bunch of folks to pick some little part of our project and try rewriting it in the different languages we were evaluating. The feedback was very clear: everyone preferred Swift! Why do we like Swift? First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6). It's also a modern language with solid ergonomics. Something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code. Swift has first-class OO support, in many ways even nicer than C++. The Swift team is also investing heavily in C++ interop, which means there's a real path to incremental adoption, not just gigantic rewrites. Strong ties to Apple? Swift has historically been strongly tied to Apple and their platforms, but in the last year, there's been a push for "swiftlang" to become more independent. (It's now in a separate GitHub org, no longer in "apple", for example). Support for non-Apple platforms is also improving, as is the support for other, LSP-based development environments. What happens next? We aren't able to start using it just yet, as the current release of Swift ships with a version of Clang that's too old to grok our existing C++ codebase. But when Swift 6 comes out of beta this fall, we will begin using it! No language is perfect, and there are a lot of things here that we don't know yet. I'm not aware of anyone doing browser engine stuff in Swift before, so we'll probably end up with feedback for the Swift team as well. I'm super excited about this! We must steer Ladybird towards memory safety, and the first step is selecting a successor language that we can begin adopting very soon. 🤓🐞

@jon_roelofs @barrelshifter Why do you hate "someone" so much? Every time I have to review that code, I silently sob at the horror.

@barrelshifter someone should modernize the compiler-dt builtins

modernizing libunwind code looks like it would be a satisfying project

@barrelshifter Ugh, that seems wrong. CMake should be able to test and identify the signature of the function to get that correct.

@compnerd the only thing that I’m personally irked by lately is OS preprocessor defines because recently I ran into a problem where someone used __GLIBC__ or __GNU__ or something to conditionally pick a function signature for some C stdlib function

@barrelshifter Yeah, the code is pretty well structured. I’m just not sure what the benefit would be, unless the purpose is to play with newer C++ constructs.

@compnerd the code is clean enough that it’d be probably be a good place to play with newer c++ stuff without having to do a real full rewrite

@barrelshifter So, by modernizing do you mean just taking advantage of some of the newer C++ features like constexpr?

@compnerd llvm

@mronge When bringing an entire ecosystem to a new environment, polishing the solution takes time. I believe that Swift's tradeoffs makes it the best choice for most applications, but business sometimes dictates a different choice.

Amazing they were able to use Swift for this. We looked into Swift for our apps on Windows but ended up using Rust instead. Three years ago Swift on other platforms was still too immature.

@EricWaffles @joshm @browsercompany We would love to have more collaborators on the tools! A small sample: WinUI Bindings @ github.com/thebrowsercomp… Firebase Interface @ github.com/thebrowsercomp… Toolchain Builds @ github.com/thebrowsercomp… UI Testing Infrastructure @ github.com/thebrowsercomp…

@EricWaffles @joshm @browsercompany We are ecstatic to share the product with everyone! We have been developing the tooling in public and have been sharing them back with the community. @browsercompany really does believe in Swift for x-plat development and would love to have others along on the journey.

More proud today than any in @browsercompany history Not bc Arc is now on Windows (yay!), but bc of HOW this team pulled it off 🥇 Arc is the 1st Windows app built in Swift 💪 We share 80% of code btwn Mac & Windows 🫂 Built alongside 150k testers <3 THE BIG BET PAID OFF!!!

🪟Arc for Windows Update🪟 🧪 ~100k beta testers onboarded 📈 ~1 million people on waitlist 📅 Opening to GA before Summer 🥇 1st major Windows app built in Swift Shoutout to @alexandracoding and the team!

We’ve talked before about how we run Swift code on Windows, but we haven’t talked about how we write Swift code on Windows. We're starting today! speakinginswift.substack.com/p/swift-toolin…

It wasn't that long ago when Swift on Windows felt like a risk, but now our Windows app is in the hands of 80,000 + members, and our devs are able to write Swift as productively as ever! Today, we published a post going over the Swift ecosystem on Windows. Link below👇

👯 Windows Buddy Day is back by popular demand! for today, mac and windows members can fast-track their buddies onto Arc for Windows Beta drop their emails in the form below and we'll do the rest 💌

Experimenting with the @browsercompany swift-winrt language projection to create a Swift WinRT & WinUI 3 Windows News App! It’s so amazing, build native Windows UI using pure Swift and share business logic across platforms such as macOS, iOS, & Linux. #iosdev