I work with a long term project to create a type of service platform that prioritises personal integrity and security according to contracts that generates technical consents and also makes knowledge and actual processing transparent to the owner (the described). This is only part of it, since the surveillance economy driven development is a societal wicked-issue. Either you fix it all or fail fixing just one disparate problem. I spend more than half of my time in Swift development, with prototypes and core development. We chose Swift because it’s relatively the most friendly and results in efficient binaries (long time Apple product-users may play a part).
In this work I’ve stumbled on the Apache projects Arrow and Parquet, that by enough deployed implementations show their sense and efficiency, especially in not needing the classic encoding and decoding loop for both persistence and communication.
To me it feels sensible that the cross environments development of Swift should take an interest in columnar data models and connect with these Apache projects. I’m sure they would give an immense boost to Apples Core-/SwiftData and to all Codable/Sendable, also lifting it to cross OS and platforms.
Are you already considering this or think it’s a relevant idea? There is a Swift-specific project within Apache Arrow, but from the available communication it’s lagging too much to the core Cpp-project to make it interesting. I just want to put the idea and question, to know if we are on our own or if there might be a broader interest.
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I’ve been poking around in this space as I learn Swift over the past year or two. I don’t think there’s one package that you’re looking for (yet), but depending on your needs there are a few places to look.
My sense is that if there are places you can contribute, folks would be more than happy to see the work done. I personally am still trying to wrap my head around what the API should look like.
There is also a duckdb swift wrapper if you're looking for something at that abstraction level. Intro blog post - Introducing DuckDB for Swift – DuckDB
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