I think swift is a really great language from the design perspective.
What makes it unusable outside the apple ecosystem imho is that while the C interop is amazing on paper, it sucks hard in practice due to the abomination of pointer types they build in.
The "all pointers are evil" attitude doesn't help when you want to use a C library and noone will write rewrite all these libraries.
This extension is for "pure" Swift development, not iOS development. I doubt the latter will ever officially happen. It's possible to make it work for iOS at an unofficial capacity though by hooking into the extension's LSP support. We did this at Spotify to enable iOS development in Cursor for Bazel iOS projects: https://github.com/spotify/sourcekit-bazel-bsp
That's just untrue on the face of it. All of the build tools are open and cross-platform. Is there a specific piece of Android Studio that you require for Android app development?
Not certain if this answers the question, but it seemed like you're generally expected to install Android Studio to get the correct build versions of all of the tools and libraries. I guess theoretically you could repackage them yourself, but also not entirely clear why you would—other than perhaps download size. The tools can be driven externally, once installed, but so could XCode projects (with `xcodebuild`).
Incorrect. You can (if you really want to) build an Android app without having any Google tools.
But even if you don't want to do any crazy stuff, Android SDK itself is just a bunch of Gradle scripts and Java apps. You can download and install them without any GUI in the way.
Sorry, but Android and iOS are simply incomparable in their quality. Android SDK is a high-quality tool for developers that provides all the expected interfaces.
iOS SDK is a lock-in GUI hell that requires you to use a shitty macOS-only tool to even _upload_ apps to Apple Store. Never mind doing headless builds in CI/CD.
Just to nit pick a bit, that link is for Android Studio and downloads from the "Google for Developers" website, then instructs how to install and manage the the command line tools using the GUI
This is a very welcome improvement but I should note the title is a bit clickbaity: using Swift on e.g. Cursor was always possible, it's just that after Microsoft banned forks from accessing the official VSCode marketplace last year you started having to workaround it by downloading and installing the .vsix file manually. Having the extension on the Open VSX Registry sorts this out so you can now install it via the proper way once more. Very happy this finally happened!
Is there an open—source Swift IDE that can modify itself without restarting? (written in Swift) I loved Oberon µSystems Oberon/F aka Component Pascal for that capability.
Now if only they'd open up iOS development so we can get AppCode back.
The primary thing keeping me away from trying it again is I have to use Xcode instead of my beloved JetBrains IDEs where I know all the keyboard shortcuts.
What makes it unusable outside the apple ecosystem imho is that while the C interop is amazing on paper, it sucks hard in practice due to the abomination of pointer types they build in.
The "all pointers are evil" attitude doesn't help when you want to use a C library and noone will write rewrite all these libraries.
But even if you don't want to do any crazy stuff, Android SDK itself is just a bunch of Gradle scripts and Java apps. You can download and install them without any GUI in the way.
This is very common in CI/CD environments. Google provides a handy tool for that: https://developer.android.com/tools
Sorry, but Android and iOS are simply incomparable in their quality. Android SDK is a high-quality tool for developers that provides all the expected interfaces.
iOS SDK is a lock-in GUI hell that requires you to use a shitty macOS-only tool to even _upload_ apps to Apple Store. Never mind doing headless builds in CI/CD.
Also I build extra tooling to facilitate iOS development in VSCode https://github.com/sweetpad-dev/sweetpad
Or am I going to have to vibe-code one.
The primary thing keeping me away from trying it again is I have to use Xcode instead of my beloved JetBrains IDEs where I know all the keyboard shortcuts.