Hello VSCode users,
We at The Browser Company recently had a small hackathon for the toolchain and developer experience teams. One of the interesting things to come out of it was this little proof of concept: jupyter notebook based REPL integrated into VSCode.
VSCode recently added a native jupyter notebook support, and the VSCode team used that to build a REPL for Python. However, being the ardent Swift supporters, we thought, why not Swift? We put together a small basic proof of concept for Swift support. The piece that actually needs some tending to is the "screen scraping" that occurs to shuttle the messages from the REPL to the notebook. However, the current implementation is sufficient to show what is possible. Here is a small screen capture for those interested in seeing it in action!
We are contributing this work back to the vscode swift extension as we want to share the work as we believe that it is something that would be useful to the rest of the community as well. Developing this in the open with the rest of the community ensures that everyone can enjoy this experience.
The PR for the changes are at REPL: introduce a new jupyter notebook based REPL by compnerd · Pull Request #1016 · swiftlang/vscode-swift · GitHub.
CC: @z2oh