What’s New in Swift, Issue 1

What’s new in Swift is a news feed that focuses on the latest articles, trends, and stories happening around the Swift ecosystem that I find interesting.  All of the topics selected in this article have been cherry picked from either Github, Swift.org, or found the Swift Forums over the last few weeks and can range from topics covered in iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, or in the Server Side community.  This latest issue focuses on SourceKit-LSP, adding Python 2 and 3 support to the Swift stdlib, a Swift by Sundell Podcast - Episode 38, and the WLAN project PureSwift. 

SourceKit-LSP

SourceKit-LSP provides code-completion, jump-to-definition and the other semantic editor features from the LSP for Swift and C-family language projects.  This will be available for such editors as Visual Studio Code and Sublime text and will run cross platform on macOS and Linux.

1. https://forums.swift.org/t/introducing-sourcekit-lsp/17964
2. https://github.com/apple/sourcekit-lsp

Adding support for loading Python 2 and 3 in Swift. 🐍

A PR was opened back on November 18th for the Swift stdlib to add support for loading Python symbols at runtime to Swift.  This PR has been actively in review by members of the TensorFlow team so I have to imagine that this is being added as a way to better support the TensorFlow efforts in Swift.

1. Original PR:  https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/20674
2. Swift stdlib addition: https://github.com/apple/swift/blob/e89c7ca51d2a2ca6cbdb1cd784972cd51f5938e1/stdlib/public/Python/PythonLibrary.swift

Swift by Sundell Podcast Episode 38.

This past week I listened to a Swift by Sundell podcast with Max Howell that discussed his work on HomeBrew, the Swift Package Manager, and also PromiseKit.  I enjoyed this episode because Max described his real world experiences on his time working at Apple and building an open source community around HomeBrew and PromiseKit.  These are valuable stories than any developer, not matter what their experience level, can benefit from listening too.

1. https://www.swiftbysundell.com/podcast/36
2. https://www.swiftbysundell.com/podcast

WLAN by PureSwift

On the Swift Forums recently an interesting Wireless LAN project for Darwin and Linux was announced by Alsey Coleman Miller called WLAN.  One of the interesting part of the WLAN project was the scanning implementation done to look for 802.11 signals that the WLAN interface can connect to.  Very cool stuff here and I am glad to see it done in Swift.

1. https://forums.swift.org/t/pure-swift-wlan/16198
2. https://github.com/PureSwift/WLAN