I've been wanting to learn Godot for some time now. Being able to develop on the iPad is supercool (for side-project game devs). In addition, you can also now run Godot on the Meta Quest (https://www.meta.com/en-gb/experiences/godot-game-engine/771...). Also, as Xogot runs on iPad and VisionOS can run iPad apps, it might even run there (haven't checked). That's a lot of fun platforms for playing around with it.

This is a project of Miguel de Icaza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza

Yep, he switched focus after how everything went with Xamarin post acquisition, seems pretty much done with anything .NET.

I still use .net :-)

But this port could not have been done with Xamarin due to the lack of SwiftUI integration.

Fair enough, happy to be corrected on the matter.

He worked on Mono for nearly two decades, and contributed significantly to the platform. He may have stopped working on it because the platform is quite mature (and Open Source) and his continued work would have limited impact.

Here a couple of examples,

https://visualstudiomagazine.com/Articles/2022/06/16/csharp-...

Or its beloved Xamarin,

" Rewrites never go as planned.

Xamarin.Forms turning into Maui was supposed to be a quick change, fueled by hopium so strong it defied gravity.

Instead, at best, it set it back 2-3 years."

https://x.com/migueldeicaza/status/1610665502598127616

You will find other juicy remarks, after the deadline to not speak about the acquisition expired.

I would love to hear more. Always been a big fan of Miguel and his positive stance towards mending fences with MS. Sad to hear transitioning to the mother ship didn't work out.

Never attribute to respect or sincerity that which can be adequately explained by contractual terms.

I am a bit surprised Apple allows it.

I am not really familiar with the apple ecosystem, but my understanding is that they frown on open execution environments, that is emulators, virtual machines, interpreters etc. and a system that lets anyone develop and load games sounds like just that.

The terms have changed gradually over the years and now we are boiling IDEs on the iPad.

My plan is to ship something that is both a great iPadOS app and operates within the confines of the AppStore restrictions.

I find restrictions as a powerful motivator to think about a problem differently. Lots of great art (and software) is great when it explores and brings to light what’s possible with the limitations of a medium.

I love the spirit here, but the limitations on iOS are not the limitations of the medium. Mobile computing has lots of interesting and inspiring limitations, we don't need apple to draw artificial squircles we can't cross in an api.

Users seem to like those squircles, judging by the popularity of Apple products. It’s not a fun walled garden to be a creative developer in.

20 years is a generation, however for many of us, Apple's walled garden was a refreshing concept versus the mobile operators gardens.

First of all, getting SDKs was akin to console devkits, back in 2004 getting a Symbian SDK was still a commercial only product for example, same for Windows CE/Pocket PC,...

Followed by about 80% tax, only to be listed on mobile phones magazines, with the SMS code to trigger the application download.

Hence why everyone rushed for the garden, it was indeed easier to be creative in Apple land.

Now 20 years later, there is another reality.

Is that significantly different now?

I could be wrong, but don’t you need to join the Apple developer program to get the sdk? It’s $100 a year, right?

I know you do to publish apps, which in the us is the only way to get apps to users.

They allow execution environments and have for many years. See pythonista etc

They haven’t allowed emulators till this year, but Xodot isn’t an emulator.

But what you’re likely thinking of with regards to execution is that they don’t allow creating new executable code. Ie no JIT or compilers, but interpreters are fine. Hence you can do GDScript (which runs in an interpreter like Python does) but you won’t be able to use the other language backends which compile down.

> they don’t allow creating new executable code. Ie no JIT or compilers

The Metal compiler is embedded in the Metal runtime and runtime compilation of GPU kernels is part of the official API. So I'm not sure if Apple would actually prohibit JIT-ing GPU code.

Now that I think of it, I wonder if you could create a Metal IDE using nothing more than the Swift Treesitter module and a Metal definition for it. As of today, you can use the Swift Playgrounds app if you don't mind not having any compiler errors or warnings provided to you.

There are various shader exploration tools for iPad and Vision Pro.

Here’s one that might catch your fancy https://youtu.be/4TiBP0loC7s?si=HUNUSg0KMwRbdcK3

Very cool!

Programming languages (IDEs) were always allowed as long as the code couldn't be downloaded from the internet. Local or cloud load/save is OK. An user copying it manually using a clipboard from a web page is OK as that's user doing. But direct downloading was a no-no. This was explained as to prevent any application from becoming AppStore-like.

There are some tricks, like using curl | sh approach by the user for UNIX-like environments, or similar things for Python IDEs. But again it is something that the user have to do and learn about it from an outside source.

I wonder if Apple will allow code downloading in the EU, now that they have to allow alternate app stores anyway.

... what's in it for Apple? It would just make their lives more complicated.

they have emulators in the app store now!

I’ve been following the development of this via Miguel’s blog and mastodon, and as someone who is really interested in iPad development and app design I really want to try it out but I just don’t have time for another hobby.

I’m signing up and gonna try it out, but I feel like I’ll need to put more than an afternoon of dabbling to get anywhere interesting.

This is very impressive, and runs well even on an iPad mini 5.

I wonder if Redot [1] is going to fork this project, as well.

[1]: https://github.com/Redot-Engine.

I don’t think this project is open source.

Impressive, happy to see another touch from Miguel.