It would be interesting to see any benchmarks / comparisons to understand what are the benefits of having Swift in the browser. Is it faster? Easier to maintain? Or is it based more on the sympathy to the programming language in general?
I am convinced we can keep it "fast enough" for most everything. Bundle size still is a weak spot, and proper bundling/splitting of wasm modules has to be willed into existence, but I see no blockers for a pretty smooth experience.
Honestly, it mostly started as a "I like Swift, can I use it everywhere?" challenge. But there is a real benefit about fully staying in a modern language and tooling environment. Swift, imho, is a very clean and powerful language that fits this space well, might as well build a comfortable way to use it for web projects.
I agree that is a real risk, but imho past behavior suggests that "Apple" Apple and open-source Apple both can exist and it's likely going to be just fine.
On the plus side: Apple is paying many many real people to progress the language and tooling mostly in the open with solid community work.
The honest original motivation was mostly "Swift for websites, can I do it?". But underneath, I really want to use one capable and modern language (+ ecosystem and tooling) for all my dev needs. That includes having a native, "in-ecosystem" solution for creating web apps of any kind. Somebody's gotta build it...
Swift is not very good. An entire generation of developers are slowly discovering this as they have LLMs rewrite their apps in ObjC & UIKit and see it yield 3x perf improvements without even getting all that far deep into the weeds on optimization.
Properly written, Swift can beat rust[1]. (Obviously the rust project could probably catch up by using the same optimization techniques than the Swift project did, but my point is Swift has nothing to envy from rust in terms of performance.)
Swift’s philosophy is “easy to use first but you can go lower if you need performance.” Rust’s philosophy is kind of the opposite. I think Swift’s philosophy is a valid, and even a more interesting philosophy than rust’s, but to each his own.
wrt. migrating to ObjC/UIKit please do post references when issuing statements like these. Possibly migrating from SwiftUI to UIKit would give performance improvements, but that has nothing to do with Swift itself. SwiftUI is actually written mostly in C++ IIRC.
Reminds me of Vapor - Swift, but on a server; https://www.vapor.codes/
Reminiscent of the now 18-year-old Cappuccino project https://www.cappuccino.dev/
Project that is still alive, amazingly.
The last release and blog post are from 2018, is it actually alive?
Yep! If you look at the GitHub repo, there is commits added in the last 5 days:
https://github.com/cappuccino/cappuccino/commits/main/
> Latest Version: 1.0.0 (September 4 2018)
There is a lot of work being done currently on the project as they prepare for v2.
The web version of Keynote with it was amazing.
I paid $20 for their interface builder and never got it.
I’d say this is closer to Blazor
Objective-J is something I entirely forgot existed.
cause there was Coffee Script, also, right?
It would be interesting to see any benchmarks / comparisons to understand what are the benefits of having Swift in the browser. Is it faster? Easier to maintain? Or is it based more on the sympathy to the programming language in general?
But great job anyway!
ElementaryUI author here:
It is listed in the js framework benchmark (as elementaryui), so you can check where it lands performancewise ATM: https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht...
I am convinced we can keep it "fast enough" for most everything. Bundle size still is a weak spot, and proper bundling/splitting of wasm modules has to be willed into existence, but I see no blockers for a pretty smooth experience.
Honestly, it mostly started as a "I like Swift, can I use it everywhere?" challenge. But there is a real benefit about fully staying in a modern language and tooling environment. Swift, imho, is a very clean and powerful language that fits this space well, might as well build a comfortable way to use it for web projects.
Cool, thanks for details and answer! I guess it would be hard to convince JS/TS lovers to try Swift but it's worth a shot :D
sooner or later this was gonna happen. Swift is like Haskell, but nicer and more programmer-friendly.
I wouldn’t fly so close to Apple if I have the choice. Apple could pivot at any moment - “New versions of Swift start at $99,99” /s
ElementaryUI author here (so biased):
I agree that is a real risk, but imho past behavior suggests that "Apple" Apple and open-source Apple both can exist and it's likely going to be just fine.
On the plus side: Apple is paying many many real people to progress the language and tooling mostly in the open with solid community work.
you're ignoring the economic context. Languages don't exist in a vacuum.
Apple would never do that, since a lot of free alternatives are always there. Scala and Kotlin are both very close.
New versions of Swift are truly cross-platform. We support iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, HomeOS, VisionOS, WatchOS as well as BodyOS, BrainOS and iThinkOS.
To help developers focus on the future, Swift 9 drops support for deprecated platforms such as Linux, Windows and the web.
/s
I'm actually a Swift developer; it's a great language, but I'm also married to the Apple ecosystem and wouldn't choose it outside of it.
Bit by bit, we are having our beloved browser plugins back, at least for some of us.
Fun project, an aside; Apple please fix the Swift compiler. It is so slow. It is so very slow.
I’m not sure the compiler is to blame there. The extremely flexible type inference means compilers have to do a lot of work.
(Examples at https://www.swiftbysundell.com/basics/type-inference/)
Their demo is flakey and sometimes fails to hydrate in Firefox latest
Looks a bit like jQuery mixed with jsx and ember or angular
Any reason/motivation why ?
ElementaryUI author here.
The honest original motivation was mostly "Swift for websites, can I do it?". But underneath, I really want to use one capable and modern language (+ ecosystem and tooling) for all my dev needs. That includes having a native, "in-ecosystem" solution for creating web apps of any kind. Somebody's gotta build it...
I recently wrote a bit about that on the swift.org blog: https://www.swift.org/blog/whats-new-in-swift-august-2026/
Nice!
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We already have Typescript, I don’t see the purpose.
‘cause Swift is great, I guess! And more seriously, probably for a shared logic with an iOS & android app.
Just wait until they rewrite Swift with Rust.
They will more likely rewrite Swift with Swift (actually they have done a small bit of it already).
Swift is not very good. An entire generation of developers are slowly discovering this as they have LLMs rewrite their apps in ObjC & UIKit and see it yield 3x perf improvements without even getting all that far deep into the weeds on optimization.
Properly written, Swift can beat rust[1]. (Obviously the rust project could probably catch up by using the same optimization techniques than the Swift project did, but my point is Swift has nothing to envy from rust in terms of performance.)
Swift’s philosophy is “easy to use first but you can go lower if you need performance.” Rust’s philosophy is kind of the opposite. I think Swift’s philosophy is a valid, and even a more interesting philosophy than rust’s, but to each his own.
wrt. migrating to ObjC/UIKit please do post references when issuing statements like these. Possibly migrating from SwiftUI to UIKit would give performance improvements, but that has nothing to do with Swift itself. SwiftUI is actually written mostly in C++ IIRC.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50178103
I'd rather use Slopjective-C 3.0 tbh
This sentiment is sorely missing from the endless Rust re-writes.
Typescript isn’t that good of a language.