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Can you create decent GUIs with Swift on GNU/Linux???
by kwargs 6y ago
Can you create decent GUIs with Swift on GNU/Linux???
- raphlinus 6y agoIn theory, yes. It's a Turing-complete language with quite nice C FFI, so you can call into Gtk just fine. In practice, uhm, no. Apple's branding of SwiftUI and Swift is a bit of a double-edged sword, I think. The former is a highly proprietary, undocumented (but beautifully engineered) walled garden that only works on Apple hardware, and only recent OS versions at that. The latter is open source and purports to be a general-purpose, cross platform language, comparable in scope to C++, C#, Go, Rust, Kotlin, and other comparable contenders. They have only themselves to blame if some of the perception of the former rubs off when people think about the latter.
- raphlinus 6y agoI meant to say "underdocumented" here. Its internals are undocumented, which is potentially a problem because there's no source available, but there is basic documentation for using SwiftUI. It's still sparse but I'm sure will improve as it matures.
- liuliu 6y agoNot really. But I did this: https://liuliu.me/eyes/write-cross-platform-gui-in-swift-like-it-is-1998/ https://liuliu.me/eyes/write-cross-platform-gui-in-swift-lik... Unlike most comments here, I felt that Swift was a Python replacement to me.