swift-win32 VS swift-nio

For jumping abord, there are not very many frameworks for UI development. There is https://github.com/compnerd/swift-win32 which is less WinForms and more Common Control based. There were a couple of different attempts for WinRT to get XAML based UI systems. There was no official support for UWP, and that would likely require some tweaks to the runtime.

Even Microsoft has someone dedicating their time to building Win32 support.

Swift does run on windows now. There’s also a package that lets you use Win32 to write GUI apps (https://github.com/compnerd/swift-win32). The core code (data models, networking, etc) can be common, but UI will have to be different (Win32 on windows and AppKit/Catalyst/SwiftUI on Mac)

As others have mentioned, UIKit is an Apple framework and not available on Windows, though you should be able to use the Win32 APIs to build out UI interfaces. Alternatively, you can experiment with https://github.com/compnerd/swift-win32 for a nice layer on top which abstracts out some of the details of the Win32 API. Unfortunately, that is not as fleshed out as one would like to build complex applications, but that is something which more usage and work on library should be able to resolve.

For native apps, there's this, which gives an AppKit-like interface to build GUIs.

If you’re looking for Windows first projects with Swift, https://github.com/compnerd/swift-win32 is pretty cool.

Also check out this project by a member of the Swift core team, which is a set of bindings for the Win32 API for Swift on Windows.

In addition to what others have said, SwiftNIO is a possible low-level web server framework.

Also look at: Hummingbird https://github.com/hummingbird-project/hummingbird Smoke https://github.com/amzn/smoke-framework Swift NIO https://github.com/apple/swift-nio

You could take a look a swift-nio (https://github.com/apple/swift-nio) which is a pretty high-throughput system. swift-nio does this using some reference-counted GC where it simplifies the code and doesn't affect performance. Otherwise, value-types are used which incur no GC overhead (unless they are copy-on-write, and backed by something that requires reference counting).

The UI and the Core are mainly written by Swift. The proxy server is powered by Apple Swift-NIO. Some critical parts (deal with low-level system APIs, high performant JSON Parser, de/compression, protobuf, BoringSSL,...) are written by Objective-C and C. For some parts that deal with Pointer, or C library, I continue using Objective-C since it's easier than using a bunch of Unsafe Swift classes (UnsafePointer, UnsafeMutablePointer, UnsafeRawPointer, etc)

> Why should they? That isn't their target audience.

Because they need it?

Apple discontinued macOS server, i bet they use Linux in some of their servers

All their networking related libs are available and tested for Linux [1, 2]

Let's not forget that they package Swift for Linux, and now also for Windows [3]

Swift is crossplatform language (you not wanting to understand it doesn't change this fact), it's not a macOS framework

[1] - https://github.com/apple/swift-nio

[2] - https://github.com/apple/swift-protobuf/blob/main/.github/wo...

[3] - https://forums.swift.org/t/announcing-swift-5-6-2-for-linux-...

I would look at NIO or something that uses it, like https://diamantidis.github.io/2019/10/27/swift-nio-server-in-an-ios-app

i use swiftnio to spin up http servers. lots of documentation online. your app logic will be the same as ios but without swiftui and uikit.

Depending on what you need, SwiftNIO might do the trick.

If you want something a little more robust for a low-level TCP connection, you can also use SwiftNIO.