When Hursh Agrawal revealed this video six months in the past, he made a daring declare. He stated they deliberate to create the Home windows model of their Arc Net Browser utilizing Swift, and it could have a local appear and feel by way of Home windows UI and controls.
It was an bold plan, however it additionally made me need to watch what they have been doing. All of it made extra sense once I discovered that Saleem Abdulrasool had joined their firm, presumably to guide this effort.
In case you’re not conscious, Saleem is a Swift core staff member and the driving drive behind Swift on Home windows and different efforts like SwiftWinRT and SwiftWin32.
I used to be glad (and simply barely stunned 😅) to see this replace from Hursh on the finish of final week. They appear to be making progress and even point out open-sourcing the cross-platform UI framework they’re creating. If they’re engaged on one thing that enables builders to share UI code throughout platforms and so they comply with via with platform match being vital, that framework might be an enormous deal.
In the present day, cross-platform Mac and Home windows (and Linux) growth is prone to imply utilizing both Electron or Flutter. Each are absolutely cross-platform, however neither creates an incredible native-feeling UI.
Swift faces an extremely difficult journey to be related as a language used for Home windows growth, however a Mac and Home windows (and Linux?) UI framework that cares about platform match can be distinctive within the trade and provides it a pleasant increase. I’m trying ahead to seeing what will get introduced when Arc showcases it.
Be aware: I additionally thought-about together with Xamarin.Mac and React Native for macOS above, however I had causes to not embody them. Xamarin.Mac creates AppKit apps and whereas it might assist with {a partially} cross-platform codebase, you’d nonetheless want a separate UI layer for Home windows. React Native for macOS doesn’t appear to have gained any traction since launching, and even the official desktop showcase has damaged hyperlinks and very few mentions of apps that work on macOS.
Dave Verwer 
