Issue 747

10^th April 2026

Written by Dave Verwer

Comment

Tracy Miranda writes about IDEs on the official Swift blog:

You can now write Swift in a broader range of popular IDEs, including Cursor, VSCodium, AWS’s Kiro, and Google’s Antigravity. By leveraging VS Code extension compatibility, these editors tap directly into the Open VSX Registry, where the official Swift extension is now live.

I was only vaguely aware of the Open VSX Registry, but after looking into it in more detail this week, it made me think about what an impact Visual Studio Code has had on the industry. It started as a small point in a long list of Visual Studio announcements from the Microsoft BUILD conference in 2015, and was met with a little skepticism, both for being from Microsoft, and for being Electron-based. Just look at it now, though! The underlying open-source code powers the majority of modern coding editors, and is even more dominant in the flurry of new AI-focused editors, like Cursor, Windsurf, Kiro, Antigravity, Trae, and more.

It’s a great editor, too. I must admit I also have a fondness for Zed, but VS Code is my day to day editor when I don’t need something Xcode-specific. I couldn’t have predicted I’d ever be happy using an Electron-based coding editor, but I am.

It’s great that Microsoft didn’t have to “win” in the traditional sense to get here, too. The heart of the editor remains free and open source, and is so important that Google and Amazon are building their next-generation IDEs on top of it and Apple is writing official setup guides for editors built on top of it.

Yes, the VS Code extension isn’t new, but the continued support of it, and the care taken to make sure it works with the VSX marketplace is important. This, along with all the other Android, Wasm, Windows, and Swift on embedded hardware news from the last year are all signs of an Apple that has changed over the last few years.

If all of that doesn’t say that Swift is bigger than Xcode, I don’t know what does.

– Dave Verwer

News

It’s not every day you get to talk about a new game engine written in Swift, but today is one of those days! Harold Serrano made an announcement his new Metal-based game engine this week, and with a focus on XR scenes and with visionOS support already in-place, it’s an interesting one!

Tools

Have you been having problems pasting text into the simulator from your Mac? I hit this bug last week and it’s really irritating. Junda Ong first provides a workaround using simctl, and then follows up by vibe coding a little Mac app designed to keep your clipboard in sync again.

Code

Max Seelemann has spent the past six months writing up his thoughts and techniques on the subject in six lengthy posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6), and concludes that:

And this concludes my miniseries on tasks and cancellation. If I learned one thing writing these posts, it’s that this is a complex field with many nuances that are easy to get wrong.

It’s a good read if you’re looking for a series that builds towards some nice real world, practical techniques.

What a great guide to the macOS sandbox from Sarah Reichelt:

My recommendation is to start every project with the sandbox enabled and using all the default settings. Enable extra permissions only as you need them. Add entitlements if the settings do not allow what you need. Only turn off sandboxing if there is no other way to make your app work.

Very detailed and well-written from a true expert. What more could you want?

What a lovely story of some extremely obscure date bugs from Aaron Trickey. Did you know that Foundation’s date arithmetic breaks before 4713 BC? Or that UIDatePicker won’t go further back than 1 AD? If you’ve ever needed convincing that working with dates over long periods of time is challenging, this is for you.

And finally...

Click clack, clack clack, click click….boom, I made something.