Writing Gnome Apps with Swift

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  1. libui-ng

    libui-ng: a portable GUI library for C. "libui for the next generation"

    I remember a few years ago, a few really cool cross-platform UI libraries were starting to emerge such as libui [0] that got me excited. I've kind of lost track of them since then (libui itself went dormant for a while before this fork) so I am not sure how mature/useful they are now, but the potential for writing native desktop UIs in basically any language seemed like an absolute dream. Perhaps it's feasible for very basic things?

    [0] https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng

  2. InfluxDB

    InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.

    InfluxDB logo
  3. swift-testing

    A modern, expressive testing package for Swift

    Take a look at https://github.com/apple/swift-testing It is under active development as Swift first replacement for xctest. For CI service, Xcode cloud does support running tests on mac and iOS hardware. https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/

  4. Tokamak

    SwiftUI-compatible framework for building browser apps with WebAssembly and native apps for other platforms

    https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak

    I’m also working (slowly) on native Flutter channels:

    https://github.com/PADL/FlutterSwift

    But this is really targeted at embedded use cases.

  5. FlutterSwift

    Flutter and Swift integration for iOS, macOS, Android and eLinux

    https://github.com/TokamakUI/Tokamak

    I’m also working (slowly) on native Flutter channels:

    https://github.com/PADL/FlutterSwift

    But this is really targeted at embedded use cases.

  6. Relm4

    Build truly native applications with ease!

    There is Relm (https://relm4.org/). Which is in Rust is just GTK (through it's Rust bindings) with a nice reactivity layer on top.

  7. swift-cross-ui

    A cross-platform declarative UI framework, inspired by SwiftUI.

    For another SwiftUI-like wrapper, see also https://github.com/stackotter/swift-cross-ui (used by Adawaita to generate widgets, and mentioned in other comments).

    The key premise of this approach is to provide a SwiftUI-like declarative wrapper around Gnome functionality. It's unclear what it adds over swift-cross-ui.

    SwiftUI itself has growing pains mainly around being on the right thread for processing/updates and getting data binding right.

    Blog entries on swift.org or from Apple tend to be little demos that show the happy path, but when discussing new frameworks (like a Gnome wrapper) or platforms (like the recent embedded), I'd like more demonstration that the authors understand and address key issues and will sustain development. Cross-platform UI frameworks get complicated quickly and have a long tail of issues (cf Flutter, Java/Eclipse, et al) that can be blockers for clients/users. For Swift it doesn't help to have multiple concurrency models and obviously different behaviors on apple platforms and Linux (where UI is not officially tested).

  8. lsp-sourcekit

    lsp-mode :heart: Apple's sourcekit

    I was curious and noticed that this looks reasonable: https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-sourcekit

    Emacs + lsp-mode + sourcekit + company-mode etc looks reasonably close to what I get with Rust in Emacs.

    If I were doing application development I'd maybe consider Swift.

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  10. owlkettle

    A declarative user interface framework based on GTK 4

    This is really cool! I love the JSX-like approach to UI and it's a shame it's not so common on desktop. https://github.com/can-lehmann/owlkettle is the only thing I find comparable.

  11. swiftenv

    Swift Version Manager

    which is at most half-truth cause this is just official installers and most likely you'll use some sort of rustup (which wasn't official few years ago) you can use https://github.com/kylef/swiftenv you can use community packages https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swift etc.

    "and so on is that languages other that swift aim to support linux in general." -> again not true linux distro dosen't change swift usage it is just official build is run for few most popular distros and you can use prebuild swift-bin on any linux repo. (arch, debina, ubuntu, centos etc. etc.) You can say the same stuff about rust/nim/go every other language that didn't have official release for some niche linux distro.

  12. swift-build

    Swift toolchain builds by The Browser Company (by thebrowsercompany)

  13. windows-samples

    Discontinued Sample Apps for Swift on Windows

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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Did you know that Swift is
the 15th most popular programming language
based on number of references?