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Comment by drmidnight | Hacker News Reader

While it takes some work I have successfully run Swift code on the usual suspects (iOS/Mac) as well as Windows, Android and Linux.

If you ditch Foundation and rely on C libs you are able to use it pretty much anywhere.

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What are you using for GUI libraries? Or are these mostly accessed from the command line?

In my own experimentation, I’ve seen some success with Vapor 4 and PlotHTML

I've actually been developing my own UI library backed by SDL. It currently uses a DSL-like system similar to SwiftUI. I just spent some late nights working on a "hot-reloading" system, though it only works on Mac/Linux currently.

In theory any C based UI libs that support those platforms should work as long as they can be called from Swift.

That’s pretty dang cool! I’d love to contribute, if you’re open to it.

The most difficult thing I’ve done with Swift/C was packaging a Python interpreter inside a Mac app with a few lxml dependencies called with PythonKit. Might not begin to scratch the surface of what you need though...

Could always use some help. It's still in it's infancy right now, very much a PoC to see if it was worth attempting. Once it gets to a good enough state I will make the repo public and let you know. Props to

Nice job embedding Python in Swift. I haven't done Python, but Wren and Gravity were pretty challenging to get working right. I was going to use a scripting layer for the UI, but eventually came up with a solution that allows for Swift to be used. I sort of mimic the system Apple uses for Playgrounds/Live Preview in Xcode.

> What are you using for GUI libraries? Or are these mostly accessed from the command line?

I'm not a Swift user, but the approach I've seen is people using it to run a localhost HTTP server for a HTML+JS frontend.

i'd be EXTREMELY interested in knowing more about that. I'm currently developing an app on iOS in swift, in the hope of porting the model layer to other platforms such as android (i don't mind redevelopping the UI).

i have been carefully avoiding any objective-c code so far, but i must admit i haven't been to careful with foundation dependencies.

Do you have a blog post explaining what you did and what limitations you encountered ?

I don't have any write-ups from myself. I was planning on eventually posting something, I have a lot of notes to sort through.

You can find some info by searching, there has been a few attempts to get it running on Android. Also just searching around github will net some other attempts.

The foundation dependency is the biggest problem. You can check out https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation which gets rid of the objc runtime dependency for other platforms, though you will find yourself writing implementations for each eventually.

I would say if you are going to stay with just Android/iOS to look into maybe moving to Kotlin or C for your common layer and then call it from Swift. Kotlin multi-platform also has been improving recently.

EDIT: Also look at the Swift github, there are some docs about different platforms. https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/main/docs/Android.md

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