I’ve been working on Swift Pro and wanted to share it here. It’s a commercial Swift plugin built around the IDE’s usual editors, toolbars, run configurations and test runner.
It brings together compiler completion and navigation, SwiftPM support, LLDB debugging, XCTest and Swift Testing results, SwiftUI previews and macro expansion.
It uses your installed Swift toolchain; Apple workflows, including previews, require macOS and Xcode.
Hi Yuriv, thanks for bringing Noctule to my attention, I had not heard of Noctule (but I have heard of Flexible Swift). Most language plugins would have package management, syntax highlighting, and debugging support as a basis, and since this is the first version of our plugin, I would expect them to have overlapping features.
While I haven’t looked into the details of these two products, I do know that Swift Pro has very good refactoring and inspection support, which we will build further upon, plus good AI integration, which could be a distinctive feature. I’ll make a comparison report between the three and see where we can excel. Thanks!
Hi, it seems I was mistaken; Noctule doesn’t seem to support debugging (Overview of Noctule • Noctule), which Swift Pro does, it doesn’t look like Noctule supports #Preview discovery, Noctule seems to be limited in refactoring (only supports Rename Refactoring Swift Code • Noctule), while we support much more refactoring options, Noctule doesn’t seem to support Macro expansion, which we do.
At the same time, Noctule supports Objective-C, which we don’t, it seems to support things better like remote development, and has better Xcode support (Additional Xcode Features • Noctule), which is something we might add later, but not now.
Hope that helps to show some differences. But, this a very early release for us, I’m confident in a month or 2 this will look different, but it’s unlikely that Swift Pro will add Objective-C support, that’s not really our focus.
Thanks for bringing up Noctule and the comparison with Swift Pro.
Today, Noctule 4.0 was released with debugger integration, macro expansion (implemented differently), Dev Container support, better WSL integration, an expanded test runner and improved Xcode integration.
True, it doesn’t implement its own refactorings besides “Rename”. SourceKit-LSP brings a few refactorings like “Extract Method” – they’re available in the editor, but not integrated any further.
For Noctule, I only add features that integrate nicely into the IDE, don’t feel out of place and which are powerful and complete – which means that better refactorings will come, just not yet.
