Top all-time · #2023
John Sundell
Personal blog · swiftbysundell.comprogramming
John Sundell writes Swift by Sundell, a personal blog at swiftbysundell.com about programming. Since 2017, 37 different Hacker News readers have linked it 153 times, most often “Swift by Sundell”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (18) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this site as a Swift learning resource, often calling it a favourite and helpful. Posts cover Swift and SwiftUI topics, and the site is also linked for its podcast.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 18 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Weekly Swift articles, podcasts and tips by John Sundell
Most-linked posts?
- Swift by Sundell4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-10-19
- Why does Swift by Sundell not use any client-side JavaScript?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-05-21
- /articles/the-swift-51-features-that-power-swiftuis-api/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-02-25
- Exploring Swift 5.2’s new functional features2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-02-10
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-12-31
- Property Wrappers in Swift2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-19
- Swift actors: How do they work, and what kinds of problems do they solve?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-11-30
What Hacker News says?
Well, I'm coming from the Javascript side, where people use promises a lot for async, but it's almost impossible to trace execution in the debugger. It's usually immediately obvious to me that many exceptions and failure modes have been missed, but I find it difficult to reason about large promise chains and I usually have no idea where I would add more error handling. It tends towards a big ball of spaghetti. Then…
Comment linking /articles/a-deep-dive-into-grand-central-dispatch-in-swift/
on “Writing an OS in Rust: Async/Await”Submitted How Swift 5.3 enhances SwiftUI’s DSL as a story · 146 points
HN discussionSwiftUI is an attempt to stop the spread of people coding for things like React and instead focus in a Apple only SDK so they accomplish their goals of developer lock in. Knowing why Apple is doing this is important to understand why this will never happen. Apparently the feature they are using is function builders (1) and its already working on the current versions of Swift. So at least now, nothing is preventing o…
Comment linking /articles/the-swift-51-features-that-power-swiftuis-api/
on “Swift on Windows”Submitted Building iPad Pro features in Swift as a story · 116 points
HN discussionA very good and recent website for learning about Swift do not have a single line of JS :) https://www.swiftbysundell.com Some people still do care! Admittedly not a lot though.
Comment linking /
on “Maybe we could tone down the JavaScript (2016)”Submitted Lightweight API Design in Swift as a story · 109 points
HN discussionHe was also recently interviewed on a podcast here: https://swiftbysundell.com/podcast/71/ .
Comment linking /podcast/71/
on “Swift Algorithms”Submitted The power of Result types in Swift as a story · 95 points
HN discussion> I want emojis in my code. Then you will enjoy swift [1]! [1] Emoji driven development: https://www.swiftbysundell.com/special/emoji-driven-developm...
Comment linking /special/emoji-driven-development-in-swift/
on “Usability Improvements in GCC 15”Submitted Small but significant improvements in Swift 5.1 as a story · 78 points
HN discussionProperty Wrappers seem pretty neat, I wasn't aware of that new feature. Thanks for mentioning it. https://www.swiftbysundell.com/articles/property-wrappers-in...
Comment linking /articles/property-wrappers-in-swift/
on “Swift Playgrounds 4”Submitted Building DSLs in Swift as a story · 73 points
HN discussionI really don't agree with most of this post but I do find the function builder[0] feature that was introduced to support SwiftUI fairly overkill. I don't fully understand why they didn't use a lighter abstraction based on arrays and normal return values like React does instead of adding all this "magic", maybe there's a really good reason that I am not seeing. All the other "magic" and defaults are excellent ideas b…
Comment linking /articles/the-swift-51-features-that-power-swiftuis-api/
on “SwiftUI Defaults Considered Harmful”Submitted Writing self-documenting Swift code as a story · 73 points
HN discussionIt's not slow by any stretch of the word compared to the rest of the web. A clean reload transfers only 300kb of data that uncompresses to 670kb. Of that 223kb(570kb uncompressed) are fonts which are heavily cached and change rarely if ever. DOMContentLoaded fires after 80ms. Subsequent loads are completely cached. In an age where the average website is multi megabyte https://swiftbysundell.com/ is a refreshing and…
Comment linking /
on “Publish – A static site generator for Swift developers”Submitted Extending optionals in Swift as a story · 69 points
HN discussionLike this idea in theory. The author's site (built with Publish) seems slow to me. Cause unknown. Would like to see more examples. https://swiftbysundell.com/
Comment linking /
on “Publish – A static site generator for Swift developers”Submitted What makes code “Swifty”? as a story · 68 points
HN discussionJohn Sundell is awesome. Other stuff he’s done: Plot: Write type safe HTML/RSS/XML in Swift https://github.com/JohnSundell/Plot Ink: Converts markdown to HTML https://github.com/JohnSundell/Ink Swift by Sundell blog https://www.swiftbysundell.com/ Podcast https://www.swiftbysundell.com/podcast I really love these lightweight, JavaScript free websites he’s helping create in Swift. It’s such a better experience loadin…
Comment linking /podcast
on “Publish – A static site generator for Swift developers”Submitted A deep dive into Swift’s function builders as a story · 64 points
HN discussionI’m not sure the compiler is to blame there. The extremely flexible type inference means compilers have to do a lot of work. (Examples at https://www.swiftbysundell.com/basics/type-inference/ )
Comment linking /basics/type-inference/
on “ElementaryUI – Swift, in the Browser”Submitted Avoiding race conditions in Swift as a story · 63 points
HN discussionDiscovered him from his podcast as well, it's wonderful. Here's an example interview with Chris Lattner: https://www.swiftbysundell.com/podcast/50/ .
Comment linking /podcast/50/
on “Lightweight API Design in Swift”Submitted The Decade of Swift as a story · 55 points
HN discussionAfter leaving Apple, Chris Lattner (designer of Swift) ended up at Google for a while and there was an attempt to make Swift a first class language for Tensorflow. An interesting podcast on the topic from 2019: https://www.swiftbysundell.com/podcast/58/ Since then he has moved on to SiFive and S4TF has been shutdown. See HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26117453
Comment linking /podcast/58/
on “Swift on the Server (2020)”Submitted Making Swift code extensible through plugins as a story · 54 points
HN discussionSure. Hacking with Swift [0] is great, CS193P [1] is very good (previous years were UIKit, now it's SwiftUI). Ray Wenderlich [2] and Swift by Sundell [3] are also good resources. The OG was NSHipster [4], but they haven't published much recently (some articles may be a bit outdated). For SwiftUI specifically, Swift with Majid [5] is a godsend and has amazing content. Finally, for learning good Swift language practic…
Comment linking /
on “Useful iOS Things GitHub Repository”Submitted Inline types and functions in Swift as a story · 40 points
HN discussionHere are my favourites: https://www.natashatherobot.com https://www.swiftbysundell.com http://whatsnewinswift.com https://rambo.codes And sporadically, I'll write a few myself: http://blog.chrishannah.me/category/swift-tips/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Great iOS / Swift Blogs?”Submitted Mutating and non-mutating Swift contexts as a story · 36 points
HN discussion
