From now on with each new version of Swift that comes out I'm going to take some time a dig through all the Swift Evolution Proposals that made it into that release. Some real gems made it into the last few releases that I didn't know anything about but are really cool. The one I'm … Continue reading Swift Property Wrappers
macOS
Fastest Way To Get The Time
So, for my 6502/6510 emulator project I've been trying to figure out the best (read that, "fastest") way to get the time with nanosecond resolution. I need this because the North American version of the Commodore 64 ran at 1.02MHz (1,022,727Hz) and so that means the clock "ticks" every 977.8 nanoseconds. And that's just for … Continue reading Fastest Way To Get The Time
SwiftSyntax
I am really going to have to start playing around with the SwiftSyntax library! It looks like I'd be able to write some real code timesavers with it.
Swift Struct vs. Class
I've been having a tough time in Swift with the Struct vs. Class issue. Unlike Java and Objective-C, Swift allows value type "classes" known as Struct types. These behave very similar to C++ objects that are created without dynamic memory allocation - in other words they're created on the stack instead of the heap. This … Continue reading Swift Struct vs. Class
Working with Dynamic Libraries in Xcode
Here's just a little tidbit that I ran across recently where Xcode, which normally does a good job covering all the bases, fell short just a bit. When you're working with dynamic libraries in just about any environment, especially Linux and MacOS, there is a two-way street when it comes to a program or another … Continue reading Working with Dynamic Libraries in Xcode
Bringing Back Some Old Friends
The designers of Swift seem to have really odd opinions regarding the merits of certain patterns that are very common across other languages. For example, they have deemed that the prefix and postfix operators "++" and "--" are, for some reason, not desirable. Weird. 🧐 Not a biggie because they also built Swift with the … Continue reading Bringing Back Some Old Friends

Let’s all meet on the Playground!
Learning Swift is a lot easier thanks to Playgrounds!
Byte Level File I/O in Swift
So, one of the first things I wanted to do in Swift was to start to port the Java model of XML over to Swift. But to do that I needed to be able to read the XML files as a series of bytes so that I could convert all the various character encodings (UTF-8, … Continue reading Byte Level File I/O in Swift
Swift – First Impressions
After playing with Swift a bit here are my first impressions of the language. There is definitely a lot to like about it! There's also a few things that annoy me. 😎 But first I'll start out with a giving you a 1,000 foot overview of the language itself. Syntax aside, Swift and Objective-C 2.0 (as … Continue reading Swift – First Impressions
Taking the Swift Plunge
Okay... So... I think I'm finally ready to take the plunge and start learning the Swift Programming Language in earnest. I've been watching it and starting with version 5 there is finally enough there for me to get excited about. But this isn't going to be easy for me. Not like it was when I … Continue reading Taking the Swift Plunge