
PL/Compiler Engineer, xplat Swift, & Swift Core Team Member @ @browsercompany (ex @GoogleAI, @facebook, @Microsoft)
Joined March 2009
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
Before Windows, @compnerd got Swift running on Android, did a PlayStation port, and laid early groundwork for embedded Swift.
In the latest episode, he shares his journey of porting Swift to Windows one patch at a time.
brightdigit.com/episodes/211…
Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
Thanks to @compnerd, we have a new Swift XML parser! 🌿
Xylem is pure Swift, zero dependencies, covering SAX, DOM, and XPath 1.0. This is the kind of infrastructure work that helps Swift thrive everywhere! 🎉 forums.swift.org/t/xylem-a-p…
Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
We've been evaluating a number of C++ successor languages for @ladybirdbrowser, and the one best suited to our needs appears to be @SwiftLang 🪶
Over the last few months, I've asked a bunch of folks to pick some little part of our project and try rewriting it in the different languages we were evaluating. The feedback was very clear: everyone preferred Swift!
Why do we like Swift?
First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6). It's also a modern language with solid ergonomics.
Something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code. Swift has first-class OO support, in many ways even nicer than C++.
The Swift team is also investing heavily in C++ interop, which means there's a real path to incremental adoption, not just gigantic rewrites.
Strong ties to Apple?
Swift has historically been strongly tied to Apple and their platforms, but in the last year, there's been a push for "swiftlang" to become more independent. (It's now in a separate GitHub org, no longer in "apple", for example).
Support for non-Apple platforms is also improving, as is the support for other, LSP-based development environments.
What happens next?
We aren't able to start using it just yet, as the current release of Swift ships with a version of Clang that's too old to grok our existing C++ codebase. But when Swift 6 comes out of beta this fall, we will begin using it!
No language is perfect, and there are a lot of things here that we don't know yet. I'm not aware of anyone doing browser engine stuff in Swift before, so we'll probably end up with feedback for the Swift team as well.
I'm super excited about this! We must steer Ladybird towards memory safety, and the first step is selecting a successor language that we can begin adopting very soon. 🤓🐞
Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
🪟Arc for Windows Update🪟
🧪 ~100k beta testers onboarded
📈 ~1 million people on waitlist
📅 Opening to GA before Summer
🥇 1st major Windows app built in Swift
Shoutout to @alexandracoding and the team!
It wasn't that long ago when Swift on Windows felt like a risk, but now our Windows app is in the hands of 80,000 + members, and our devs are able to write Swift as productively as ever!
Today, we published a post going over the Swift ecosystem on Windows.
Link below👇
We’ve talked before about how we run Swift code on Windows, but we haven’t talked about how we write Swift code on Windows.
We're starting today!
speakinginswift.substack.com…
Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
👯 Windows Buddy Day is back by popular demand!
for today, mac and windows members can fast-track their buddies onto Arc for Windows Beta
drop their emails in the form below and we'll do the rest 💌
Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
Experimenting with the @browsercompany swift-winrt language projection to create a Swift WinRT & WinUI 3 Windows News App!
It’s so amazing, build native Windows UI using pure Swift and share business logic across platforms such as macOS, iOS, & Linux.
#iosdev
We’re dedicated to sharing our work @browsercompany - so today we’re publishing our first post on building rich native experiences on Windows with Swift & open sourcing our swift-firebase repo
First up, interoperability! Windows APIs, COM, C++ and how they integrate with Swift🧵
Alongside this, today, we're making swift-firebase public, a library that uses C++ Interop to access Firebase from Swift on non-Apple platforms!
This is just the first of many as we bring more of our dependencies to Windows.
github.com/thebrowsercompany…
Over the next few weeks we’ll be releasing more posts on learnings that have allowed us to build Arc in Swift on Windows incl.
- Our WinUI/RT bindings
- How we do UI testing on Windows
- and much more
We’ll be sharing on speakinginswift.substack.com along the way - see you there!
Swift is just a `winget install swift` away! #Windows10 #SwiftLang
Bridging Swift to modern Windows: github.com/compnerd/SwiftWin…. You can call into the Windows Runtime from Swift - and it looks like you would expect! #Windows10 #SwiftLang
Why, yes, you can do hardware accelerated 3D graphics with Swift on Windows! A small proof-of-concept Direct3D demo application written entirely in Swift and HLSL.
github.com/compnerd/DXSample
Santa is running a bit ahead of schedule: swift-crypto now builds and passes all tests on Windows! @tomerdoron @Lukasaoz #SwiftLang #Windows
Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
Initial Windows support has landed in Swift System, thanks to @compnerd!
github.com/apple/swift-syste…
COM is the basis for so much Windows technology that it is bound to come up. github.com/compnerd/swift-co… demonstrates how to use COM from Swift and even how to implement a COM interface from Swift! #SwiftLang #Windows10
macOS, Linux, or Windows, may your packets flow freely! Announcing a swift-nio port for Windows! forums.swift.org/t/windows-n… #SwiftLang #networking
Reducing barriers to entry for Swift is important. Prebuilt docker images with complete toolchains, multiple SDKs, and pre-configured VSCode to help make it easier to get started at hub.docker.com/r/compnerd/sw…
forums.swift.org/t/reducing-…
#SwiftLang #Docker












