Issue 715

20^th June 2025

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

You might have missed it in the run up to WWDC, but I want to highlight a recent article on the official Swift blog titled “Swift at Apple: Migrating the Password Monitoring service”.

Details of how Apple use Swift in server environments have been hard to come by. It’s clear Apple care deeply about this subject from the sustained work they do on NIO and related packages. That said, apart from a brief mention in a 2024 WWDC video, there has never been any public confirmation they’re using it in production. This recent blog post changes that and gives details of Apple’s use of Swift and Vapor in production apps used by more than a billion people. Even better, it’s written down, public, and in an easily linkable blog post format. 🚀

Swift is in a tricky spot right now. It’s clearly dominant as the language for writing Apple platform apps, but outside of that, it’s struggling.

Even though he said it humourously, I never really liked Chris Lattner’s famous quip:

“My goal for Swift has always been and still is total world domination.”

Programming communities can easily become tribal. It’s easy for people to slip into thinking that “their” programming language is the best, and nothing written with other languages can be good. I’ve written about this before and still hold the belief that we’re stronger when we open our hearts and minds to other technologies and communities rather than when we look inwards.

So does that mean I’m happy for Swift to focus on what it does best and not try to take on every task? It’s the best way to build apps for Apple platforms, and maybe to write a small web app with, but that’s the end of the story. Right?

In one way, yes. I don’t really feel like Swift needs to be “the one true language” and try to climb to the top of every niche. That said, I do think it’s important for the success of the language that Swift takes expansion into new areas seriously.

Swift is currently an incredibly niche language outside of Apple platform development, and that’s dangerous for everyone involved. How do we attract young people to write Swift when it might narrow their career options to do so? It’s a hard sell next to, for example, JavaScript that might be seen to “do it all”.

It’s great to see Apple writing publicly about their use of Swift on the server, and I hope it doesn’t stop with this blog post. I hope we can see this and other success stories make their way off the Swift blog and into a more permanent home on the Swift website¹. I also hope we see more Windows, Wasm², Android³, and other platforms grow now they are (or are becoming) viable to use from Swift.

Expanding the platforms that Swift can be used with isn’t about “world domination”. It’s about making sure Swift is an attractive language for people to learn and use.

– Dave Verwer

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Tools

Naturally, this little utility from Rafael Conde only works if you have Tahoe installed. If that’s you, then download it and have a quick play!

Code

We’ve had the new APIs in our hands for almost two weeks, which is enough time for Paul Hudson to summarise what’s new. His picks for the biggest changes are the web view and rich text editing improvements, but this post covers a huge list of what’s new and changed in a nicely readable format.

I really love that Xcode 26 has introduced an “Approachable Concurrency” mode. Here’s Donny Wals to explain what it is, and why the default compiler mode is now to treat your app as a single threaded process. Oh, and if you’d like a more in-depth look at the change then Matt Massicotte has what you’re looking for.

I like the way Justin Searls thinks about the “best bits” of WWDC as code snippets! No long descriptions or overly wordy descriptions, just four code snippets. Three related to the foundation models, and one about #Playground.

Design

David Smith:

Something my design lab consultant said, which was really clarifying for me, was that Liquid Glass should generally be used to highlight content underneath the button.

This makes perfect sense to me, too.

Books

Is there an irony in the title of Sarah Reichelt’s new book when her previous book was named “macOS by Tutorials“? Maybe! 😂 But it doesn’t make the problem people face any less real. How do you transition from following a YouTube video or blog article to striking out and making what you want? That’s the question she tackles in this book.

And finally...

I glanced at the new website to see what’s up and OOH COOL BIRD! 🐦‍⬛