Earlier I had mentioned OpenSwiftUI
<https://github.com/OpenSwiftUIProject/OpenSwiftUI>, a free
reimplementation of SwiftUI that we might be able to use if we ever
implement the Swift-ObjectiveC bridge and implement CAAppKitBridge.
Here's a few other interesting developments in the Swift world.
There's SwiftCrossUI <https://github.com/stackotter/swift-cross-ui>,
which seems to have a lot more platform support than OpenSwiftUI. It
currently has AppKit, UIKit, WinUI, Gtk4, and Gtk3 backends. It diverges
from SwiftUI in some aspects, in order to make it easier to keep being
cross-platform.
@JWIMaster <https://github.com/JWIMaster> has built a Swift 5.10
toolchain for iOS 6
<https://github.com/JWIMaster/Swift-5.10.1-for-iOS-6>, along with
polyfills for UIKit <https://github.com/JWIMaster/UIKitCompatKit> and
Foundation <https://github.com/JWIMaster/FoundationCompatKit>. They have
started on implementing support for iOS 6 in SwiftCrossUI
<https://github.com/stackotter/swift-cross-ui/issues/216>.
Skip <https://skip.tools/> is an implementation of SwiftUI for Android
on top of Jetpack Compose (the current Google-recommended UI library for
Android). It also has an interesting build tool (proprietary), which
deals with Swift-JVM bridging and also is able to transpile Swift to
Kotlin, or do a native (i.e. via the Swift LLVM compiler) build of the
Swift code.
SwifDroid <https://github.com/swifdroid> tries to do it a bit
differently, by having a SwiftUI-like UI framework which is modified
specifically to match the Android-native models of app lifecycle and UI.
It has its own Swift-JVM bridge (different from Skip's), and does not
have any proprietary components.
All in all, there's a lot of interesting developments going on in the
cross-platform Swift sphere. These are probably not directly relevant,
but once we implement the Swift-ObjectiveC bridge they may become pretty
useful, as it can give us access to Android's native UI framework, and
we can use OpenSwiftUI or SwiftCrossUI to provide a SwiftUI frontend on
top of gnustep-gui.
