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The loss of AppCode from Jetbrains was a huge blow to my motivation to continue working with Swift. Xcode just can't compare.

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 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!

Use swift as a scripting language without the slow start time:

Swift Caching Compiler - https://github.com/jrz/tools

This is huge, long time coming. Interested to see if there is SwiftUI support.

i was hoping this was going to be AppCode rising from the grave but nah it's just more rebranded versions of VSCode. nothing new here

We’ve used SweetPad and it worked fine for us, so this doesn’t change much.

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.

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.

Or am I going to have to vibe-code one.