WWDC 2016

-

I just wrapped up my second year at WWDC! It was great meeting so many people, making new friends, and talking to Apple engineers in the labs.

Some things I thought were especially noteworthy:

  • iMessage. Apple completely revamped their iMessage app to include recorded handwritten messages that you can play back, bubble and screen effects, music sharing, reactions, and more emphasis on emoji, including suggestions and 3x larger sizes. However, I'm most excited about iMessage apps! Not only can non-programmers now quickly make sticker packs without writing a single line of code, but also developers can create interactive iMessages. People can download these apps from an app store in their iMessage apps. Furthermore, the messages can be saved in sessions, so people can save screen space - this is especially useful in group chats. For example, in Apple's demo iMessage app, you see just the final ice cream and the history ("we added scoops") instead of a bunch of half-finished ice creams. 

iMessage apps have a lot of potential: users in the future could easily make payments, talk to businesses, book appointments, request rides, order food, play games with friends, etc. The changes so far and in the future could help iMessage catch up to and maybe replace apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, GroupMe, Slack, and Snapchat. (See this post from a16z for more about where iMessages could go: http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/) You can download Xcode Beta to try making an iMessage app now! It's still a little buggy, as to be expected from a beta - as I was developing, I noticed glitches between autolayout constraints and the Messages framework. A couple Apple engineers explained some of the hacky things they were doing at the moment involving iMessage app view controllers, so continue filing bug reports if you notice anything strange! 
  • SiriKit. Apple is also opening up Siri to developers.
  • Swift. It was fun seeing an overview of all the proposals for change made by the open source community for Swift 3, with a focus on clarity and compatibility. You can see a full list of proposals here: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/tree/master/proposals. I'm also excited about Swift Playgrounds, which is an iPad app Apple made for kids to learn how to code. In addition to the dedicated coding keyboard, the graphics on it are really fun - I'll definitely download the app and try it out when it's released this fall!  
Here are also some links to the talks that I really enjoyed, in no particular order:

Popular posts from this blog

Space Race: a simple Rust game built on the Bevy framework

-
Image
When I saw a post announcing the release of the Bevy framework  (an open source game engine written in Rust), I thought it'd be a fun way to learn Rust.  So I made Space Race , a 2 player game on top of the Bevy framework. How to Play The Astronaut moves around collecting jewels (using WASD keys). The Alien moves around trying to catch the Astronaut (using arrow keys).  The Astronaut wins if they collect at least 5 jewels and make it back to home base before the Alien catches them.  The Alien wins otherwise.  Things I learned about Rust  I had a lot of fun making & playing this game, and also got some hands on experience with Rust like working with structs enums vectors iterators traits dyn trait vs impl trait  dyn trait is used for trait objects, which are fat pointers made up of 1) a pointer to the value 2) a pointer to a vtable. A vtable is a table of methods, where each method points to its implementation, generated once at compile time. Each i...
Read more

Building a Toy Language Compiler in Go

-
Image
A follow-up to my previous post about building a toy language interpreter in Go. Throughout this post, I'll be referencing my repo . We'll go over a compiler which translates source code to machine code, and then a VM to execute this machine code. What is a compiler?  A compiler takes source code and translates it to executable machine code . (See my previous post for more details.) The figure below shows the high-level architecture of a simple compiler. Like the interpreter we built previously, our compiler has a lexer and a parser which turn our source code into an AST . This is our compiler's frontend . However, that's where a compiler diverges.  The compiler may translate the AST into at least one internal representation (IR) . The IR(s) may be represented using any data structure (even another AST!), but they should follow two rules: (1) be easy to produce, (2) be easy to translate into the target machine code. The IR can also be optimized...
Read more

tldr: Raft + Implementation Tips

-
Image
Part of the tldr series , which summarizes papers I'm currently reading. Inspired by the morning paper . Raft (Extended Version) + Implementation Tips [2014] Ongaro et al. Note: For implementation tips, see the end of this blog post.  Introduction Consensus algorithms The r eplicated state machine approach  is useful for providing fault-tolerance in distributed systems. It lets a cluster of unreliable machines continue operating even when some of its members fail. In this approach, machines   usually use a replicated log to stay in sync. As shown in the figure below, each server's log stores the same commands in the same order. Every state machine executes commands from its own log in order. State machines are deterministic, so each produces the same order of outputs. Once the majority of machines have responded, the command is done executing. Consensus algorithms ensure that the replicated log stays consistent. In the figure above, clients s...
Read more