swift – Rhonabwy

Language and framing

Quite a few years ago, I was fortunate to sit in a presentation where Yukihiro Matsumoto talked about his inspirations when making the Ruby programming language. One of the references he cited was the 1966 science fiction novel from Samuel Delaney Babel-17. I was in Portland at the time, and was able to get aContinue reading “Language and framing”

RealityKit on macOS

Guessing which frameworks are going to be updated, and which aren’t, is — I think — a part of developing software on Apple platforms. Sometimes it’s clear based on what’s been updated over the past three or fours, as is the case with RealityKit. I started my experiments with SceneKit, another lovely high-level API toContinue reading “RealityKit on macOS”

DocC plugin PSA

In my last two posts about using DocC, I’ve been implicitly encouraging the use of the new docc-plugin for the Swift package manager. I did so knowing that it is in beta and the underlying APIs are evolving – and in my example scripts I include how to do the same thing with commands thatContinue reading “DocC plugin PSA”

Tips for getting the most out of DocC

1 – Start by adding doc comments to your types. The starting point is adding a single short summary sentence as comment (using the ///) for each public type in your library or app. Feel free to add more: if you add a “blank line” (meaning include another line with /// but nothing else inContinue reading “Tips for getting the most out of DocC”

Hosting your Swift Library Docs on Github Pages

The beta for Xcode 13.3 dropped yesterday. With it came a released version of Swift 5.6 and a bunch of neat additions that the 5.6 release enables. A feature I was watching closely was two-fold: the capability for plugins to extend the commands available within swift’s package manager, and a static hosting option that wasContinue reading “Hosting your Swift Library Docs on Github Pages”

API Design decisions behind Lindenmayer in Swift

Procedural generation of art is fascinating to me. The scope of efforts that fall into the bucket of procedural generation is huge. Quite a lot of what you find is either focused on art or video games. Within procedural generation, there is a topic that really caught my eye, I think primarily because it wasn’tContinue reading “API Design decisions behind Lindenmayer in Swift”

Adding DocC to an existing swift package

During WWDC 21, Apple announced that they would be open sourcing documentation tooling (DocC) that’s used to build and provide documentation within Apple. At the tail end of October 2021, the initial version of DocC was released — available on Github, scattered through multiple repositories: swift-docc swift-docc-render swift-docc-symbolkit Apple hosts documentation about DocC (presumably writtenContinue reading “Adding DocC to an existing swift package”

Second Guessing Yourself

I’m working through the book: Crafting Interpreters. The author — Bob Nystrom — used Java for the first half of the book, a lovely choice, but I wanted to try it using the Swift programming language. Translating it on the fly was a means to exercise my programming and language knowledge muscles, and that doesContinue reading “Second Guessing Yourself”

Translating Java Into Swift

I’m working through the online book Crafting Interpreters, (which I highly recommend, if you’re curious about how such things are built). While going through it, I’m making a stab at translating the example code in the book (which is in Java) into Swift. This is not something I’m very familiar with, so I’m trying aContinue reading “Translating Java Into Swift”

Iterating through Strings in Swift

I recently decided to dive into a new bit of learning – creating my own software language interpreter. No, I’ve not gone stark raving mad due to COVID isolation, it is an interesting challenge that I wanted to understand better. Over a year ago, I remember Gus mentioning the process of creating an online bookContinue reading “Iterating through Strings in Swift”