Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by anonymouse008 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

anonymouse008·

Wait, so you compile a swift executable that’s callable from js? How would one distribute this client side in browser?

I’m not smart enough to understand this. I love swift, vapor and node individually, I don’t get it together

View on HN

Node’s a server-side thing, so I don’t think you’d distribute these in the browser.

It's a desktop thing too when working with cli tools or electron, though I've found that for electron I just end up calling other languages via IPC on stdin/out. It might not be as fast as ffi from node, but its certainly leagues easier and clearer.

Other way round.

NodeJS has had FFI for over a decade that allows you to call functions in .dylib/.a/.dll on Mac/Linux/Windows. I've used it extensively to link with libraries provided by USB device manufacturers to avoid direct USB interfacing.

See:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/ffi

This let's you call Node from inside Swift.

You wouldn't run this in the browser. On the frontend, this would be useful for Electron apps (which run an embedded Chromium for the UI and a local node server for business logic and interfacing with the operating system) on MacOS. On the backend, this might be useful if you have a node-based API and want to share some Swift code between your iOS frontend and node backend.

It might be possible to compile it to web assembly and then call it in the browser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com