BioSwift Devlog #1: Let's Compile DNA in Swift

mirrored-chameleon — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 01:29:04 +0000

Howdy! I am currently working on building a bioinformatics library for Swift, like BioPython, Rust-Bio, and BioRuby. I am building it on a MacBook Pro from 2018, and I have already faced a few challenges I didn't know about when writing packages in Swift.

For instance, I didn't know that renaming a file was that difficult. Xcode started flipping out and erasing code the moment I tried changing my poorly named dna.swift and rna.swift files to DNA.swift and RNA.swift. The file references broke and everything turned red.

I had to use my absolute lifesaver, GitHub Desktop, to get most of my code back, and AI to help regenerate the missing enum pieces that got erased from the disk. On the topic of AI I have used some of it to help with the absolutely nuts things, like spelling out all of the 20 amino acid names (some of them are ridiculous, like phenylalanine).

Thankfully, the tests I have wrote passed after having to re-piece the code together. Using ExpressibleByStringLiteral it is easy to initialize and change the RNASequence and DNASequence types that I have wrote. We can translate DNA into RNA and RNA into the Amino Acids.

So far BioSwift has been fun to write, and hopefully we can cue off of the code ending scenarios that I didn't know about. If you want to see some of my other projects, check out my GitHub: https://github.com/mirrored-chameleon. Thanks for reading!

DEV Community: mirrored-chameleon

BioSwift Devlog #1: Let's Compile DNA in Swift