Ahead of WWDC 2025, the Swift official website has undergone a comprehensive redesign. The new design aims to enhance user-friendliness, highlight Swift’s technical strengths, and make it easier for beginners to get started. As a programming language deeply connected to the Apple ecosystem, the website naturally incorporates strong Apple-style visual elements.
After comparing the redesigned Swift.org with other mainstream programming language websites, I noticed that the new homepage looks significantly more modern, effectively reducing the previously overly technical and cold impression, and creating a welcoming first experience for beginners. As someone passionate about Swift development, I appreciate the message the community is conveying with this update and hope Swift continues to uphold its characteristics of elegance, fluidity, and creativity.
In addition to the website redesign, the Swift community recently shared some exciting news. Engineers from Apple and the Swift community showcased a major real-world case study: Apple has completely migrated the backend of its Password Monitoring service, which handles billions of requests daily, from Java to Swift using the Vapor framework. After migration, system performance improved by approximately 40%, memory usage decreased dramatically from tens of gigabytes to hundreds of megabytes, and nearly half of the server resources were freed up. This shift has resulted in significant advancements in concurrency handling, code maintainability, and resource efficiency.
Although Vapor has long been the most prominent server-side framework within the Swift ecosystem, its adoption in enterprise-scale applications has been relatively slow due to a lack of high-profile, large-scale production cases. Apple’s official adoption of Vapor in a critical business application not only represents a key milestone for server-side Swift development but also serves as a highly valuable reference for teams looking to build high-performance backend systems.
Furthermore, the Swift community has recently resolved the long-standing issue of excessively long compile times affecting Swift Macro developers and users. By enabling the compiler to utilize pre-built versions of the Swift-Syntax library, the community has significantly reduced the compilation burden. This improvement will undoubtedly further encourage the adoption and application of Swift Macros.
Overall, the Swift community has thoroughly warmed up for WWDC 2025. What surprises will Apple bring to developers next? Let’s eagerly anticipate this annual grand event.
This issue is published two days early to allow more time next week for covering WWDC 2025.
Originals
Notepad.exe: A Lightweight Swift Code Editor
Xcode Playgrounds seems to have drifted from its original intention, while configuring VSCode can feel overwhelming for beginners. So how can we build a lightweight environment for learning and experimenting with Swift? This article introduces Notepad.exe, which might just be the answer you’re looking for.
Recent Recommendations
WWDC 2025 Wish List Roundup
What do developers hope Apple will bring to the table this year? Can it breathe new life into the developer ecosystem? Michael Tsai compiled a list of WWDC 2025 wishes from active developers across blogs and social platforms — including improved Xcode stability, SwiftUI performance, plugin system openness, AI integration, faster TestFlight reviews, and expanded iCloud storage. How many of these dreams will become reality on WWDC stage?
Embedding Godot Games in iOS Apps is Easy Now
For years, SwiftUI has supported embedding SpriteKit scenes via SpriteView for interactive experiences. Now, you can achieve something similar with [Godot](https://godotengine.org/?utm_source=fatbobman weekly issue 87&utm_medium=web).
In this article, Christian Selig shares how to embed Godot scenes directly into iOS apps like any SwiftUI view. But this is more than just “stuffing a game into your app” — it gives developers real flexibility: build rich, cross-platform game content in Godot, while leveraging Swift and native APIs for UI, subscriptions, iCloud sync, and more. It’s a best-of-both-worlds approach.
Note: This currently only works on physical devices (not in Simulator), and bundling a Godot game adds around 30MB to your binary.
A Brief History of Mac OS Version Numbers
Why is Ventura macOS 13 and Sonoma macOS 14? What happened with the overlap of 10.16 and 11? Ahead of WWDC 2025, Howard Oakley takes us through the evolution of macOS version numbers—from System 1 all the way to macOS 15—and how Apple has balanced UI naming with underlying kernel versions over the years.
Honestly, I still can’t keep all the code names straight 🙃
iOS Lifecycle: Handling willEnterForeground in AppDelegate and SceneDelegate
Starting with iOS 18.4, UIKit logs a warning if your app hasn’t adopted the scene-based lifecycle — and in the near future, this will escalate to a launch-time assertion. In other words, AppDelegate-based lifecycles are going away.
Ashish Kakkad compares the behavior of applicationWillEnterForeground and sceneWillEnterForeground, showing key differences in cold launch scenarios, timing, and multi-window setups — a practical guide for anyone planning to migrate.
Dealing with 0xdead10cc’s in SwiftData
The dreaded 0xdead10cc crash has long haunted iOS developers — typically caused by holding file locks during suspension, especially in setups where multiple processes share a Core Data / SwiftData store.
In Issue 84, we shared an article suggesting avoiding shared Core Data stores altogether. But Scott Driggers took a different path.
This post dives deep into diagnosing the crash and offers a workaround using beginBackgroundTask(withName:expirationHandler:) to ask the system: “Hold off on suspending — I just need a bit more time to finish.”
Clean, Reusable Swift Code Using DRY Principle
“Don’t Repeat Yourself” (DRY) is one of the most cited coding principles — and one of the most commonly violated. In this post, Saif uses practical Swift examples to show how functions, extensions, computed properties, generics, and protocol extensions can help you write cleaner, more reusable, and more maintainable code.
DRY improves quality, but don’t overapply it — sometimes repetition is clearer when logic appears similar but serves different goals.
Tools
DataScout for SwiftData
DataScout by Oleksii Oliinyk is a macOS debugging tool for SwiftData and Core Data. Compared to traditional database viewers, it stands out with:
- Schema display that mirrors your SwiftData models
- Built-in
#Predicate-style filtering, no SQL knowledge required
In this post, Oleksii shares the vision and technical background behind the tool. He also offers an open-source companion, DataScoutCompanion, for inspecting data directly during app development.
AppRouter – Lightweight Navigation for SwiftUI
Created by Thomas Ricouard, AppRouter is a minimal navigation tool designed specifically for SwiftUI. By defining just three types — Destination, Sheet, and Tab — and conforming to simple protocols, developers can implement elegant navigation, modal presentation, and path management with ease.
For apps with relatively simple navigation and a strong focus on native SwiftUI components, AppRouter offers a clean and intuitive routing solution worth trying out.