4 ms·

So now we can program on the iPad, but only with Apple’s approved language, on its approved ide. Can’t a government go there and knock the wall down?

Koshkin 5y ago
Apple has a natural monopoly on Apple's products.
mattcwilson 5y ago
Swift Playgrounds has been around for quite some time. I’d also hesitate to think of it as a way to “program on an iPad.” It’s a slimmed down IDE + visualization pane intended to be an educational environment for people wanting to learn programming fundamentals, Swift specifically, or how to program one of the robots/drones/programmable devices that have a companion lessonbook.
- zepto 5y ago
  That’s what it was before this update. Now it is a full development tool that lets you release commercial apps.
dangoor 5y ago
https://codea.io https://codea.io and others have been around longer than Swift Playgrounds.
kmeisthax 5y ago
There's actually a whole host of iPad apps that will give you programming environments for Python, JavaScript, and so on. iSH will give you a full x86 Linux box and a-Shell supports compiling and running WASM/WASI binaries in a simulated shell environment. They've been around for some time, too; Apple really does not give these things the fanfare they deserve. The main wall that I can see needing to be knocked down would actually be technical, not political. Something like OAMA[0] absolutely would not fix the lack of JIT entitlements or virtualization support accessible to third-party developers in iPadOS. I would not be surprised if Swift Playgrounds is either relying on lots of Apple-only entitlements or compromising on performance[1]. If we had proper virtualization, then we wouldn't need iSH; we could load up a real Linux distro and run a LAMP stack or Docker containers on iPads. [0] Open App Markets Act; similar provisions were in the EU Digital Markets Act at one point [1] The screenshots I'm seeing suggest that, at a minimum, your code runs in the same sandbox as the editor. Which means Apple hasn't added any sort of private API that would let Swift Playgrounds properly provision your app. Without a JIT entitlement, the editor would also need to include an AArch64 emulator inside itself in order to provide the App Preview feature. These sorts of things won't matter to casual programming use-cases but would kill a lot of the benefits of an on-device development environment.
- avidphantasm 5y ago
  Would love to see a JetBrains IDE on iPad. Not holding my breath though.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  I haven’t looked closely at the new implementation in Swift Playgrounds yet but historically it’s compiled your app in debug mode to native ARM64 code, then run it directly using a private entitlement.
zepto 5y ago
Why not just buy a tablet from someone else if you don’t want a managed environment? Apple is not the only tablet maker.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
On what grounds? It's their platform
boxed 5y ago
Pythonista is a lot better and more powerful than Swift playgrounds. It's also available on iPhone. So you're just flat out wrong.

Koshkin 5y ago

Apple has a natural monopoly on Apple's products.

mattcwilson 5y ago

Swift Playgrounds has been around for quite some time. I’d also hesitate to think of it as a way to “program on an iPad.” It’s a slimmed down IDE + visualization pane intended to be an educational environment for people wanting to learn programming fundamentals, Swift specifically, or how to program one of the robots/drones/programmable devices that have a companion lessonbook.

zepto 5y ago
That’s what it was before this update. Now it is a full development tool that lets you release commercial apps.

dangoor 5y ago

https://codea.io https://codea.io and others have been around longer than Swift Playgrounds.

kmeisthax 5y ago

There's actually a whole host of iPad apps that will give you programming environments for Python, JavaScript, and so on. iSH will give you a full x86 Linux box and a-Shell supports compiling and running WASM/WASI binaries in a simulated shell environment. They've been around for some time, too; Apple really does not give these things the fanfare they deserve. The main wall that I can see needing to be knocked down would actually be technical, not political. Something like OAMA[0] absolutely would not fix the lack of JIT entitlements or virtualization support accessible to third-party developers in iPadOS. I would not be surprised if Swift Playgrounds is either relying on lots of Apple-only entitlements or compromising on performance[1]. If we had proper virtualization, then we wouldn't need iSH; we could load up a real Linux distro and run a LAMP stack or Docker containers on iPads. [0] Open App Markets Act; similar provisions were in the EU Digital Markets Act at one point [1] The screenshots I'm seeing suggest that, at a minimum, your code runs in the same sandbox as the editor. Which means Apple hasn't added any sort of private API that would let Swift Playgrounds properly provision your app. Without a JIT entitlement, the editor would also need to include an AArch64 emulator inside itself in order to provide the App Preview feature. These sorts of things won't matter to casual programming use-cases but would kill a lot of the benefits of an on-device development environment.

avidphantasm 5y ago
Would love to see a JetBrains IDE on iPad. Not holding my breath though.
saagarjha 5y ago
I haven’t looked closely at the new implementation in Swift Playgrounds yet but historically it’s compiled your app in debug mode to native ARM64 code, then run it directly using a private entitlement.

zepto 5y ago

Why not just buy a tablet from someone else if you don’t want a managed environment? Apple is not the only tablet maker.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

On what grounds? It's their platform

boxed 5y ago

Pythonista is a lot better and more powerful than Swift playgrounds. It's also available on iPhone. So you're just flat out wrong.