Jacob’s Tech Tavern

Jacob’s Tech Tavern

Automate all the things with Swift Subprocess

Is Swift finally ready for Scripting use cases?

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Jacob Bartlett
Sep 08, 2025
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Swift. The general-purpose programming language designed for safety, performance, and ease of use. This was the sales pitch, but the language has consistently struggled to break out of the prison of the mobile niche, towards other mainstream workflows.

Scripting is one of those use cases that has theoretically been possible in Swift since forever, but is so painful to work with, it’s functionally useless, even for trivial workloads.

Until today.

Kind of.

Today we’re going to look at the brand-new, hot-off-the-press, seriously-it-only-got-released-this-Friday swift-subprocess. It’s a new package that promises to solve some of the chronic, incandescent pain points that Swifty scriptwriters were living with.

Today, we’re going to look at the weird world of scripting:

  • What is scripting? Why does Swift scripting suck?

  • How can we use swift-subprocess to automate stuff in Swift?

  • (because apparently I’m an influencer now) what do I really think?

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If you’re not sure about upgrading yet, consider how much of your life you can automate if you got the hang of Swift scripts. Appraise the value of your time. Ponder whether you’ll save more than $12 worth of time in the first month. Perhaps the premium subscription will have already paid for itself!

XKCD

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