The Browser Company Is Building a Swift Development Toolchain for Windows

Hursh Agrawal, cofounder of The Browser Company (makers of the upstart browser Arc, which for now is Mac-only):

We’re sprinting hard to get Arc onto Windows in 2023 — exact timing still 🤐!

His tweet has a two-minute video that outlines a tremendously ambitious plan:

  • Swift on Windows (compiler, debugger)
  • VSCode integration, Swift bindings for WinAppSDK
  • Porting Arc to Windows

If they pull it off, they’ll ship a toolchain to develop cross-platform Mac/Windows apps, programmed in Swift using VSCode. I have my doubts about whether this is possible from a small team, and I have different doubts about whether this would be a good way to write good Mac apps. So I’d ignore this for now — but for the fact that Arc itself is very interesting, and very much real.

It’s not for me, but it really has a bunch of innovative, original ideas for a web browser. They’ve proven that they can ship. So I say godspeed.

★ Tuesday, 2 May 2023