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If you’ve used the Swift Package Manager, you have interacted with its handy command-line tool. When creating command-line tools, we strive to provide an easy to use interface. One of the main characteristics of a good CLI tool is how it handles parameters...
Read More...State machines are used to model systems that can be thought of as a collection of states, and a collection of events that cause state changes. Many of the systems we want to model can be abstracted to a state machine. For example, elements in a Game...
Read More...System libraries are typically defined using C, that means we need a way to make them available to Swift. In this post, we are going to explore how to use the Swift Package Manager to give us access to C libraries, be it system or user-defined.
Let...
Read More...Long gone are the days when single process single thread was the norm. We now take multithreading for granted, we expect all our applications not to lockup when we interact with them. We expect them to handle multiple users at the same time, etcetera...
Read More...Last week we discussed how to build XPC Services(the .xpc bundles) inside your macOS applications. This week we are going to explore how to provide XPC services that can be used from other applications or tools.
To make the XPC service available to...
Read More...We have access to many Inter-Process-Communication(IPC) mechanisms in macOS. One of the newest is XPC1. Before XPC a common way to use IPC, and provide services between processes, was through Sockets or Mach Messages (Using Mach Ports).
Nowadays...
Read More...Many components of macOS trace their roots back to BSD. One key aspect inherited from BSD is the Kernel Event Notification mechanism know as Kernel Queues (kqueues for short).
In the past, before kqueue(2)1/ kevent(2)2, when we wanted to track events...
When we find ourselves listening for events, reacting to those events, and then going back to listening for more events, we have ourselves an Event-Loop. Having an event-loop is a common scenario. So common that Apple decided to provide us with a model...
Read More...Apple provides many useful network frameworks. Network.framework (you can check my previous article on Network.framework if you want to see an example) is the latest. But sometimes we need to go deeper, and the abstractions might get in the way. In...
There are many reasons to use more than one programming language in a project. In some cases, a lot of work has gone into building a framework (years maybe). Rewriting the whole framework to have the codebase in the same programming language, might...
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