Viewing profile — jacobx

Hi HN! We're back with another post describing more detail about how we built Bitrig's interpreter for Swift in Swift, this time going into how we're converting the code into bytec…

Yep! You can always export your code to take it to your computer. We also have functionality in bitrig to build your app and send it to App Store Connect so you can deploy it on Te…

We have a Mac app that we're beta testing with our existing subscribers. Is there a reason you want this on iPad instead of the Mac?

Yeah there was definitely some back and forth about it before we were eventually approved. In a sense, this isn't very different from what React Native does (run interpreted code t…

There's definitely a cost: everything is type-erased and there's a lot more indirection than there would be if the code was compiled. But you usually don't hit performance issues b…

I refer to Swift as a "compiled language" because no officially provided interpreter exists for it. Bitrig runs Swift apps which are dynamically generated by an LLM on the iPhone, …

That's not really been something we'd been considering, but yeah I think we probably could. We're primarily using the interpreter to render SwiftUI views, but it supports running a…

I just pushed a change that should fix scrolling on Android browsers.

Yeah you could! The only caveat is that either the whole app, or at least the part of the app showing the view you want to replace, would have to be running via the interpreter. We…

Thanks for letting us know! We're investigating now.

Thanks! Yes, it works just as well with UIKit. Fortunately Xcode can synthesize a .swiftinterface for Obj-C frameworks bridged into Swift, so we use that to generate a compiled int…

Hi HN! Since we launched Bitrig ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45041185 ), we've gotten questions about how it's able to run dynamically generated Swift code. I wrote up th…

Thanks! Sure, feel free to email us: contact at our domain name.

Yes, we think that could be a really cool way to allow mocking up changes to parts of an app, especially for non-technical members of the team. We're not set up for that yet, but i…

Thanks, we'll have to update the Contact Us link to work more generically. The Send Feedback link is when you're inside of a project, and you tap the ... in a circle button. It upl…

Per month

Yeah this is an area we want to make a lot better. What we're currently thinking is giving the model a way to more explicitly call out that it is adding a call to something that ne…

I think that’s a pretty good list. The main one I would add is “creators will want to make native Swift apps to have a better user experience”

Yeah that’s been my experience too. You can edit the Swift code directly in bitrig, though editing code on a phone is not the best experience. We’ve had a lot of requests for a Mac…

There’s still a lot to do to make this work really great for the Swift ecosystem, and that’s where we have the most expertise, so that’s what we’ll be focused on for now. That said…

Yeah we’d love to find a way to give away more in the free tier for hobbyist users and subsidize that with other things. The idea of us putting an ad in unpaid apps as another opti…

We’ve gotten a lot of requests for WebKit, so we’ll try to add it soon. If we hit issues we can try to pull in just a subset, but one nice thing about Swift is the frameworks have …

Yeah there’s a Send Feedback button when you’re in a project that sends feedback along with the code for that project. We also have a discord here: https://discord.com/invite/C7ndW…