PL/Compiler Engineer, xplat Swift, & Swift Core Team Member @ @browsercompany (ex @GoogleAI, @facebook, @Microsoft)

Joined March 2009
Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
Before Windows, @compnerd got Swift running on Android, did a PlayStation port, and laid early groundwork for embedded Swift. In the latest episode, he shares his journey of porting Swift to Windows one patch at a time. brightdigit.com/episodes/211…
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
Thanks to @compnerd, we have a new Swift XML parser! 🌿 Xylem is pure Swift, zero dependencies, covering SAX, DOM, and XPath 1.0. This is the kind of infrastructure work that helps Swift thrive everywhere! 🎉 forums.swift.org/t/xylem-a-p…
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
We've been evaluating a number of C++ successor languages for @ladybirdbrowser, and the one best suited to our needs appears to be @SwiftLang 🪶 Over the last few months, I've asked a bunch of folks to pick some little part of our project and try rewriting it in the different languages we were evaluating. The feedback was very clear: everyone preferred Swift! Why do we like Swift? First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6). It's also a modern language with solid ergonomics. Something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code. Swift has first-class OO support, in many ways even nicer than C++. The Swift team is also investing heavily in C++ interop, which means there's a real path to incremental adoption, not just gigantic rewrites. Strong ties to Apple? Swift has historically been strongly tied to Apple and their platforms, but in the last year, there's been a push for "swiftlang" to become more independent. (It's now in a separate GitHub org, no longer in "apple", for example). Support for non-Apple platforms is also improving, as is the support for other, LSP-based development environments. What happens next? We aren't able to start using it just yet, as the current release of Swift ships with a version of Clang that's too old to grok our existing C++ codebase. But when Swift 6 comes out of beta this fall, we will begin using it! No language is perfect, and there are a lot of things here that we don't know yet. I'm not aware of anyone doing browser engine stuff in Swift before, so we'll probably end up with feedback for the Swift team as well. I'm super excited about this! We must steer Ladybird towards memory safety, and the first step is selecting a successor language that we can begin adopting very soon. 🤓🐞
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
🪟Arc for Windows Update🪟 🧪 ~100k beta testers onboarded 📈 ~1 million people on waitlist 📅 Opening to GA before Summer 🥇 1st major Windows app built in Swift Shoutout to @alexandracoding and the team!
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
👯 Windows Buddy Day is back by popular demand! for today, mac and windows members can fast-track their buddies onto Arc for Windows Beta drop their emails in the form below and we'll do the rest 💌
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
Experimenting with the @browsercompany swift-winrt language projection to create a Swift WinRT & WinUI 3 Windows News App! It’s so amazing, build native Windows UI using pure Swift and share business logic across platforms such as macOS, iOS, & Linux. #iosdev
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
Back in the day @compnerd efforts helped a lot to make Fiber2D on Android a reality, now he pwned Windows port!
It's hard to overstate @compnerd's technical achievement in porting Swift to Windows. Watch this talk and boggle at the scale of the challenge he took on! youtube.com/watch?v=Zjlxa1NI…
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
It's hard to overstate @compnerd's technical achievement in porting Swift to Windows. Watch this talk and boggle at the scale of the challenge he took on! youtube.com/watch?v=Zjlxa1NI…
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
How do you get neural networks to recognize locomotives? You train them. 🚂
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
Let’s just agree any group of 3 or more handsome British men should be referred to as a “cumberbatch.”
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
Due to a security leak, your biometric data may have been compromised. We recommend that you change your fingerprints as soon as possible.
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
Lights still out at the #SuperBowl? Don't blink. #DoctorWho
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
Somewhere, a Real time / Embedded / C/C++ / Assembly developer hanged himself xitter.cf/dkapuchino/status/2878… /via @dkapuchino
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
Fuck you Alsa. Fuck you very, very much. Grr.
Beginner: "Threads are hard." Intermediate: "Don't fear multithreading." Expert: "Threads are hard."
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
After functional programming, I realize dependency injection is just currying for masochists.
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
OH (While talking to a copy of a previous final): "Don't worry, paper. You'll be recycled into something much less vile in your next life."
Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
It's Summer, right? I only ask because of the lightning. #PaloAlto
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Saleem Abdulrasool retweeted
The next person who gripes about non-free firmware blobs will have to show the source for their keyboard controller & southbridge firmware.
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