ExtensionKit and XPC
ExtensionKit is a pretty significant new feature of macOS Ventura. But, I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t know, as it had a conspicuously quiet introduction. There were no sessions or labs about it during WWDC 2022. I only discovered it because a friend stumbled across the beta documentation and sent it to me.
[…]
At a high-level, you can define extension points in your app, either with or without a UI component. All communication between extension and host goes over XPC, and there’s a bit of infrastructure provided by Apple for discovering available extensions and establishing a connection.
One of the most exciting things ExtensionKit can do is remote views. This is a view that is constructed with SwiftUI and managed within the extension, but displayed within the hosting application. As far as I can tell, this arrangement is totally transparent and supports virtually everything that SwiftUI can do, even animation. Perhaps the only real downside is window/view resizing can sometimes have a little lag.
There is now some documentation for ExtensionKit.
Being a communication system, all XPC calls can fail. They can fail even if the method does not return an error. And, because of how they can fail, XPC methods do not guarantee that their reply callback will be called. This is extremely important, because that behavior violates the Swift concurrency runtime requirements. XPC calls will hang your tasks when they fail. Because of this, it is unsafe to use this technique in your XPC interfaces.
[…]
This poor fit between XPC and Swift has bothered many others. There are two libraries that look pretty nice for dealing with all this nonsense: SwiftyXPC and SecureXPC. They both offer async/await support, and use
Codablefor serializing data. Unfortunately, they also both use their own custom communication primitives. That doesn’t work well for us - ExtensionKit requiresNSXPCConnectioninstances.
I want to give a big shout-out to Matt Massicotte of ChimeHQ for dropping another awesome Swift open source package that makes using XPC Swift-ier. I’m really grateful for all the amazing work Matt has been doing and for sharing it with the community.
[…]
So among a ton of other things, here are Matt’s concurrency and XPC related packages (some recently split off of ConcurrencyPlus)[…]
Previously:
