timsneath

What a lovely blog in general: some really fun retro-computing projects, written up in a very thoughtful, human way. Feels like a throwback to the earlier hacking spirit of the internet. Thank you, Colin: your "experiment with writing" is a success as far as I'm concerned!

One fun example is this Playdate game: https://news.play.date/news/four-corners-swift/

Here's a more comprehensive list of different platform examples: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-embedded-examples

To clarify a few comments here: this is not only OCI containers: container machines add support for persistence and filesystem mounting, making container machines a great lightweight Linux environment for developers using macOS. More details here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/389

Swift goes further down the stack than you might at first imagine -- there's a lot of Swift written at Apple even in places where you might expect C.

The container CLI tool wraps the underlying Containerization framework, which in turn vends packages for things like EXT4 file system support -- all written in Swift. Here's one example as a jumping off point. https://github.com/apple/containerization/blob/main/Sources/...

Sounds a bit like "We Didn't Playtest This at All" (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31016/we-didnt-playtest-...), which is a lot of fun as an icebreaker game in various settings. This version has the cards prepopulated with content.

Also see https://www.engadget.com/ai/you-can-turn-a-cluster-of-macs-i...

Also announced today… AWS official support for Swift lambdas: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/the-swift-aws-lambda...

In macOS 26, you can see every Rosetta app that has recently run on your machine by going to System Information and then Software / Rosetta Software. It includes the "Fallback Reason" (e.g. if you manually forced the app under Rosetta or if it was an Intel-only binary).

Ha! But that's not semantically meaningful Swift code in any normal context, nor is it idiomatic. `self` is equivalent to `this` in C++, and is never normally null.

You use this construct for unwrapping nullable fields, for example something like this:

guard let httpResult else { return }

Note that you don't need to assign the value to itself in modern Swift. This line takes an optional (httpResult?) and returns early if null. If not, you can use it with strong guarantees that it's not nullable, so no need for ? or ! to unwrap it later in the scope.

This doesn't transpile. It cross-compiles to Android architectures using the NDK. You can see a very simple "hello world" example at the bottom of this article:

https://www.swift.org/documentation/articles/swift-sdk-for-a...

It's worth noting that this doesn't add any expectations for how your UI is built. The example shown in the screenshot continues to use Jetpack Compose (Android's native UI) with Kotlin invoking Swift business logic. You can also use other UI frameworks on Android, of course, including some that are written in Swift.

One nice thing about this implementation is that it shares many of the same characteristics as Swift on other platforms: unlike some common alternatives, it's not garbage collected but uses reference counting; it uses the same underlying libraries, concurrency primitives and memory model.

Excited to see how folk use it... it's technology that will hopefully springboard some other interesting innovations.

[Disclosure: I work on developer tools and frameworks at Apple.]

I didn't understand the introduction here, which says both:

> The well-maintained NTFS driver in the Linux kernel enhances interoperability with Windows devices

and

> Currently, ntfs support in Linux was the long-neglected NTFS Classic (read-only), which has been removed from the Linux kernel, leaving the poorly maintained ntfs3.

Is it well-maintained or long-neglected? Or am I misunderstanding this?

And just for fun, they also support what must be the most weird encoding system -- UTF-EBCDIC (https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.5.0?topic=unicode-utf-ebcdic).

OPA solves the problem of defining and enforcing policies across a system. Some examples:

- How do I enforce that inbound API requests come only from trusted sources?

- How do I enforce fine-grained access to user records?

- How do I enforce a set of naming conventions for a data update?

Many such policies may come from regulatory requirements, may be regional in nature, and may change in otherwise stable codebases. And it's even harder when you're applying this to a highly-scalable production internet service. As a result, defining policy at an organizational level with auditing is a challenge for large enterprises. OPA helps enterprises administer and enforce policies.

More details on what OPA does here: https://www.openpolicyagent.org/docs/philosophy

And you can see some examples of Rego (the policy language) here: https://play.openpolicyagent.org

The framework that container uses is built in Swift and also open sourced today, along with the CLI tool itself: https://github.com/apple/containerization

That's built in now -- the default VSCode "Format Document" / "Format Selection" commands work with just the Swift extension installed.

Good news! https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/swift

It runs on Linux-based infrastructure. We've updated the blog post to clarify this. Thanks!

Very feasible. From embedded (https://www.swift.org/blog/embedded-swift-examples/) to Linux apps (https://www.swift.org/blog/adwaita-swift/) to tiny games (https://www.swift.org/blog/byte-sized-swift-tiny-games-playd...) to ML (https://www.swift.org/blog/mlx-swift/) to Windows (https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-everywhere-windows-interop/) to Private Cloud Compute (https://github.com/apple/security-pcc)...

Working on it: https://github.com/swiftlang/swiftly?tab=readme-ov-file

Of course! Tons of examples here: https://github.com/apple/swift-embedded-examples

At WWDC24, we shared a session on embedded Swift, which is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqxbsADqDI4

More documentation on embedded Swift tooling here: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift/blob/main/docs/EmbeddedSw...

(Disclosure: I work at Apple.)

It used to be that Hacker News was a place for the inventors, the technologists, and the futurists. What happened to our optimism and excitement for firsts?

Airfares have dropped precipitously over the last fifty years: https://simpleflying.com/50-years-airfares/, and it's quite possible that the trend will continue.

Conversely, the speed of commercial flight has barely changed over that time (with the exception of longer flights reducing stops). Boom is innovating in this area and bringing supersonic flight within reach again -- I for one think that's something to be celebrated.

That is exactly the goal of Private Cloud Compute, part of the fabric of Apple Intelligence: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/#:~:te....

More here: https://www.swift.org/blog/announcing-swift-homomorphic-encr...