My parents-in-law have always been in good health, especially my father-in-law, who had never been hospitalized in his more than eighty years. Yet within a short span of time, they both went through life-threatening moments — fortunately, both ended well.
The first incident involved my mother-in-law. The day we picked her up from the airport, we noticed she looked unwell. She mentioned not having slept well and suspected another episode of kidney stones. Just as we decided to cancel our dinner plans, she suddenly began shaking violently, though her forehead remained cool. When we checked her blood oxygen level, we saw it dropping rapidly — even with immediate oxygen support, it fell as low as 78.
By the time the ambulance arrived (about 40 minutes later), her temperature had risen to 39.8°C, reaching nearly 41°C upon arrival at the hospital. She was in very poor condition. Fortunately, because she had mentioned kidney stone discomfort earlier, the doctors quickly conducted examinations and diagnosed urosepsis — the stone had blocked her ureter, allowing bacteria to multiply rapidly and enter her bloodstream. The doctor told us bluntly that had we arrived any later, the consequences could have been dire. Thinking about how she had just gotten off the plane, we couldn’t help but feel terrified in hindsight — thank goodness the flight wasn’t delayed, thank goodness we had chosen the early morning flight that day. After emergency drainage surgery, her condition improved significantly the next day, and she was discharged after a few days.
Shortly after, it was my father-in-law’s turn to experience his own “dangerous but fortunate” ordeal. While caring for my mother-in-law, he developed a cough accompanied by a mild fever. A CT scan showed only bronchiectasis, but given his age, we insisted he be hospitalized for observation. During a routine ECG, the doctor unexpectedly discovered he had atrial fibrillation, with his heart rate fluctuating dramatically between 130 and 170. Astonishingly, he felt no discomfort whatsoever. He later told us that during his physical examination in May, the doctor had mentioned the arrhythmia, but he hadn’t taken it seriously — nor had he told us. Because of the extremely high heart rate, treatment immediately shifted to controlling his cardiac rhythm. Once again, fortune smiled upon us — after several hours on amiodarone, his heart rate gradually dropped below 80, successfully restoring normal rhythm. Although he remains hospitalized, his condition is stable, and after discharge he’ll only need to continue heart rate control and anticoagulation medication. This fortuitous discovery likely helped him avoid the serious complications that atrial fibrillation can bring.
Two unexpected crises within a single week reminded us of both the fragility of life and the importance of cherishing the present. Fortune often favors those who act promptly and take health warnings seriously. May we all pay more attention to our own and our loved ones’ health — and rely less on luck.
Recent Recommendations
onChange(anyOf:initial:_:)
onChange is a commonly used state observation tool in SwiftUI, allowing developers to execute logic when a specific value changes in a view. However, despite multiple improvements over the years, it still can only observe a single value at a time. To execute the same action when multiple states change, developers must add multiple identical onChange closures. In this article, Matt Comi leverages variadic generics to enable onChange to monitor multiple values simultaneously, creating a more efficient and elegant solution.
ScrollView snapping in SwiftUI
Since iOS 17, developers can control ScrollView scrolling behavior through scrollTargetBehavior, such as snapping by page or by view. In this article, Natalia Panferova explores the API’s usage in detail and shares practical experience along with pitfalls to avoid: view-aligned mode requires each snap target to fit within the visible area; when a single item’s size exceeds the container size, scrolling feels “stuck”; for oversized items, custom ScrollTargetBehavior implementation is needed.
In Mastering SwiftUI Scrolling: Implementing Custom Paging, I also demonstrated how to resolve scroll offset and imprecise page alignment issues in landscape mode through custom ScrollTargetBehavior.
Roadmap for improving the type checker
As a Swift developer, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the dreaded “unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time” error. Why does this compilation error occur? How will Swift reduce its frequency? Swift core team member Slava Pestov provides detailed explanations and improvement directions in this roadmap.
The issue stems from the exponential time complexity of constraint solving. To prevent the compiler from endless backtracking, Swift imposes two limits: a maximum of 1 million disjunction choices and a constraint solver memory cap of 512 MB. Swift 6.2 achieved initial speedups through optimized underlying algorithms, while Swift 6.3’s new disjunction selection algorithm and memory optimizations brought significant improvements: type-checking time for the same test project dropped from 42 seconds to 10 seconds. The Swift team’s goal is to compress “exponential worst-case scenarios” into fewer, more edge-case situations through continuous algorithm and implementation optimization, without sacrificing language expressiveness.
Playing with Sheet (on iOS)
On iOS, Sheet once meant “full-screen takeover”—sliding up from the bottom, blocking everything, waiting for the user to tap “Done.” But that era has passed. Apple has redefined content presentation: under the new design philosophy, Sheet is no longer an interruption but part of the rhythm—it can slide, float, expand, collapse, keeping the interface coherent and breathing. Danny Bolella demonstrates the customizable features of modern Sheet from multiple perspectives and shows through examples how these features transform Sheet from “flow interruption” to “context expansion.”
For the issue of Sheet not automatically adapting to content height, developers can achieve dynamic height adjustment through this technique that measures content height with
GeometryReaderand combines it with.id()refresh.
Optimize Your App’s Speed and Efficiency: Q&A
Anton Gubarenko compiled Q&A content from Apple’s “Optimize your app’s speed and efficiency” event, covering SwiftUI performance (closure capture optimization, Observable usage, @Binding vs let), Liquid Glass containers (GlassEffectContainer best practices), Foundation Models framework (multilingual support, concurrent usage, latency optimization), and Instruments tools (Hitch vs Hang, new Power Profiler), among other key areas.
This Q&A demonstrates Apple’s engineering team’s practical approach to performance tuning: transforming optimization from “black box experience” into “measurable, verifiable engineering processes” through detailed analysis and tool-driven methods.
Workaround: how to silence individual deprecation warnings in Swift
In development, it’s inevitable to use deprecated APIs. When enabling “warnings as errors” (-warnings-as-errors), this creates a compilation dilemma. Unlike Objective-C, which can use #pragma clang diagnostic to disable warnings for specific code sections, Swift still lacks an equivalent mechanism.
Jesse Squires shares a clever solution: define a protocol wrapping the deprecated API, implement it in an extension marked with @available(*, deprecated), then call it by casting to the protocol type. The compiler looks up the method through the protocol witness table, thus “hiding” the deprecation warning. While the approach is somewhat verbose, it’s practical for pure Swift projects that must use legacy APIs.
Deep Dive into Swift Internals: From Binary Optimization to Reverse Engineering
The following articles are quite hardcore, suitable for readers interested in toolchain, runtime, and binary-level details.
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static const in header cost: dyld ships with redundant 2KB data copy by Kyle Ye
Reveals the causes and costs of binary bloat through a case study of
static constheader definitions being duplicated across multiple compilation units in dyld, and proposes fixes. -
Reverse engineer a swift binary by Erk Ekin
Demonstrates how to disassemble Swift executables, locate strings and conditional branches, and achieve “patched” execution through instruction modification and re-signing, using a simple login program.
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How do researchers reverse-engineer private frameworks? by Jacob Bartlett
Introduces how to extract Mach-O from Simulator runtime and reconstruct private framework interfaces using MachOSwiftSection, parse Swift metadata structures, and even observe system capability evolution through version diffs.
Tools
Swift Stream IDE - Cross-Platform Swift Development Extension
Swift Stream IDE is a powerful VS Code extension developed by Mikhail Isaev, designed to enable developers to smoothly build Swift projects targeting non-Apple platforms. Based on VS Code’s Dev Containers extension, it fully encapsulates compilers, dependencies, and toolchains in Docker containers, achieving truly consistent and portable cross-platform Swift development experience. Currently, Swift Stream supports multiple project types, including Web (WebAssembly), Server (Vapor/Hummingbird), Android (library development), and Embedded (ESP32-C6, Raspberry Pi, etc.).
In The Swift Android Setup I Always Wanted, Mikhail also demonstrates how to efficiently build Android native libraries by combining Swift Stream IDE, swift-android-sdk, and JNIKit.
The advantages of containerized development include: keeping the host environment clean, ensuring reproducible builds for old projects, supporting consistent cross-platform development experience, and enabling remote development on more powerful machines via SSH.
AnyLanguageModel - Unified Swift LLM Development Paradigm
Many developers may not immediately adopt the Foundation Models framework introduced at WWDC 2025, but most are impressed by its API—this framework significantly simplifies interaction with language models and fully leverages Swift language features.
Mattt’s AnyLanguageModel implements an API fully compatible with the Foundation Models framework: simply replace import FoundationModels with import AnyLanguageModel, and you can integrate multiple cloud and local model backends (OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, llama.cpp, Core ML, MLX, and Foundation Models) without changing upper-layer business code. Additionally, the library leverages Swift 6.1’s Traits feature to selectively include heavy dependencies, significantly reducing binary size and improving build speed.