When Hursh Agrawal printed this video six months in the past, he made a daring declare. He stated they deliberate to create the Home windows model of their Arc Net Browser utilizing Swift, and it might have a local feel and look when it comes to Home windows UI and controls.
It was an formidable plan, but it surely additionally made me wish to watch what they have been doing. All of it made extra sense once I discovered that Saleem Abdulrasool had joined their firm, presumably to guide this effort.
In case you’re not conscious, Saleem is a Swift core staff member and the driving power behind Swift on Home windows and different efforts like SwiftWinRT and SwiftWin32.
I used to be completely happy (and simply barely stunned 😅) to see this replace from Hursh on the finish of final week. They appear to be making progress and even point out open-sourcing the cross-platform UI framework they’re creating. If they’re engaged on one thing that enables builders to share UI code throughout platforms and so they observe by with platform match being vital, that framework may very well be an enormous deal.
At present, cross-platform Mac and Home windows (and Linux) improvement is prone to imply utilizing both Electron or Flutter. Each are absolutely cross-platform, however neither creates an amazing native-feeling UI.
Swift faces an extremely difficult journey to be related as a language used for Home windows improvement, however a Mac and Home windows (and Linux?) UI framework that cares about platform match could be distinctive within the business and provides it a pleasant enhance. I’m wanting ahead to seeing what will get introduced when Arc showcases it.
Observe: I additionally thought of together with Xamarin.Mac and React Native for macOS above, however I had causes to not embrace them. Xamarin.Mac creates AppKit apps and whereas it may assist with {a partially} cross-platform codebase, you’d nonetheless want a separate UI layer for Home windows. React Native for macOS doesn’t appear to have gained any traction since launching, and even the official desktop showcase has damaged hyperlinks and very few mentions of apps that work on macOS.
Dave Verwer  
