Bringing Swift to the Apple ][

8 days ago

SwiftII is a Swift-like mini development environment for the Apple II, inspired by Apple Pascal's bytecode approach.
The project targets original Apple II hardware with constraints like 40,704 bytes of main RAM and uses a bytecode VM instead of native 6502 code.
It features a REPL, file browser, text editor, and compiler, with support for digraph input on pre-IIe keyboards due to character limitations.
Memory banking (e.g., Saturn 128K or IIe aux RAM) allows expanded features and larger programs, but requires separate disk images for different hardware.
Development relied heavily on AI assistance (Claude and Codex) over 18 phases, with design documents to manage context and decisions.

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