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Comment by Cyberdog | Hacker News Reader

1. Why the hell is this an iOS app?

2. How the hell is this an iOS app?

Not a crazy question, but I'm guessing it's so users can feel comfortable learning Swift wherever they are. Yes, it's true that you should be on Xcode for serious development but I'm guessing this is aimed at the user who has never coded in Swift before.

1) It's kind fun, like an interactive text book.

2) Not actually running any (of your) code, or coding really. Tap this to fill in a string, or to select an operator from a few approved.

Why is this downvoted so heavily? Seriously, how is this implemented? I don't think Emscripten works with Swift yet, and even if it did, there hasn't been enough time since the open source release to implement an entire app.

Umm, I used it while sitting in my daughters' swimming gala for several hours. It was splendid. At one point in the tutorial they suggest that you might want to open Xcode alongside, but tutorials on the Tube etc. are great.

Because swift is for apple...?

Not any more, the opensource vesion is here, runs on ubuntu and fedora (i hae got it compiled on fedora). Enterprising souls are right now working on a windows version.

In practice, nobody is seriously writing Swift code (or any other code) on iOS devices. My meaning was I don't understand why this is an iOS app instead of a Mac app or even a web one (like IBM's Swift sandbox[1]).

That being said, I'm kind of impressed someone managed to get an app on the App Store that can do this. I know that Apple loosened its restrictions on code execution on iOS a while back, but as far as I am aware there's no way to compile Swift on ARM… did they write their own compiler/runtime or something?

1: https://developer.ibm.com/swift/2015/12/03/introducing-the-i...

It is a learning tool. Handy to have on a mobile device. Learn while commuting for example.

The lessons and exercises are limited in scope enough that they are entirely static. The work the app needs to do is limited to parsing, stylizing, checking (simple) syntax and matching user input to the task, not executing it. The lessons themselves are no more complex than a programming PPT presentation that looks prettier.

All the more reason iOS is a bizarre platform for this, then.

What's bizarre about it? Apple developers tend to own other Apple devices and are likely to want to learn Swift on the go.

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