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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

During the State of Platform keynote, on the subject of Swift adoption across macOS, several examples were given, not only TrueType engine.

RIS is happening across all OS levels, if the keynote is to be believed.

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They’ve been doing it for years. I don’t remember how we first knew, but I know they’ve been using Swift in kernels for at least some of the other chips like the Secure Enclave or whatever.

I’m not sure exactly which. I assume it’s some of the code and not all. But it’s not new in the abstract.

That said I don’t think I’ve heard of it in the kernel of MacOS on the main processor. That may be new.

Either way this is certainly the most concrete announcement I remember them ever giving on this stuff.

I know internally they use an IPsec implementation written by Rust (I think in the iCloud infra). Heard this from an ex-Apple engineer Ben (forgot his last name) that did a wonderful presentation of Rust from first principles. He said that it was hard to get people in on Rust when most would argue for Swift.

Edit: This is the guy: https://rustcurious.com/course/

Some stuff was discussed at Meet with Apple security event a few months ago, and the talks on FoundationDB rewrite, or why Swift Embedded subset came to be.

However I miss them actually having had one of those 15 - 30m WWDC sessions, where they could have gone a bit deeper into the keynote examples

Curious the direction of Webkit as there was a nebulous mention of select portions being rewritten from C++ to Swift. And yet, the new ECMAScript module (ESM) loader for Safari 27 is implemented in C++ (https://webkit.org/blog/17967/news-from-wwdc26-webkit-in-saf...).

No idea, maybe the private parts of the code, Safari isn't open source, or is coming later.

In any case I would have liked to have more info during the deep dive sessions.

As it is, Meet with Apple on security (a 5h long event) had much more information.

Alexandre Colucci has published a series of articles analysing the use of Swift in iOS and macOS by Apple here:

https://blog.timac.org/categories/reverse-engineering/

And frequently discussed on Hacker News:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Thanks!

What does RIS stand for?

Rewrite in Swift

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