I don’t know should you’ve observed, however Swift is attempting onerous to shake the picture of being just for Apple platform improvement. Check out among the posts from the Swift weblog during the last yr and also you’ll spot a theme:
Apple additionally not too long ago introduced swift-java, and it was in response to my writing about it that Luke Howard received in contact to inform me about his venture.
He’s constructing a {hardware} machine to be used in recording studios. It makes use of a mixture of applied sciences however has Swift at its coronary heart. The machine displays and mixes audio tracks which can be flying round an Ethernet community as Audio over IP (AoIP). It captures the audio and offers musicians the flexibility to make their very own combine from the person AoIP feeds and output it to their headphones. For instance, a drummer would possibly flip down different channels to give attention to their very own output whereas setting the remainder of the band to be quieter.
I had a fast name with Luke and Peer Espen Ursfjord, one other developer on the venture, earlier this week to study extra about it. The {hardware} is constructed round a Raspberry Pi CM4 with a small touchscreen. The Swift app runs on Linux and handles the creation of two mixes for 2 headphone ports on every machine. All of the back-end logic occurs in Swift utilizing some open-source libraries written by Luke and his staff. It then makes use of Flutter for the UI with their FlutterSwift library. The top result’s a tool you possibly can both management from the embedded touchscreen or from an iPhone, a Mac, or an Android cellphone!
Luke is a musician and producer by occupation however has all the time saved one foot within the Apple improvement world ever since he labored on Rhapsody in 1997/98. That blend of backgrounds exhibits, and is usually the place you get probably the most attention-grabbing merchandise. Software program builders know repair issues that software program builders have, however herald some skilled expertise from exterior of the business and magic can occur.
If you mix that area data with Swift’s potential to slot in with different applied sciences you possibly can progress rapidly. That mentioned, Luke was eager to say that he’s constructing on the shoulders of giants just like the individuals behind Open Management Structure (OCA) and the work of the Swift and Flutter groups:
“One factor I actually need to drive house is that this isn’t rocket science. I’ve not finished something half as intelligent because the Swift staff has with C++ and Java interoperability. FlutterSwift is only a few thousand traces of structured concurrency glue round Flutter platform channels. The sweetness is what you are able to do with it, which is to make your platform-specific Flutter code platform-agnostic.”
That goes again to my level about completely different views, but additionally exhibits how far we’ve got include interoperability with Swift. I hope you’ll get impressed and take a look at a number of of the hyperlinks on this article and join their notification checklist the place they’re gathering curiosity.
I’ll end with my favorite quote from Luke throughout our dialog:
“Having C, C++, Dart, Java, and Swift in the identical course of is sort of ridiculous, however one way or the other all of it works.”
I’m actually glad we stay in a world the place not all the pieces is pure Swift.
Are you doing something attention-grabbing with Swift that isn’t an iOS/macOS app? Let me know by replying to this e mail.
Dave Verwer 
