Implementing SwiftUI views using Playground

One of the most surprising and useful innovations brought by Swift is the Playground, a simple file that contains Swift code and that can be seen and modified in real time without waiting for a full cycle of a rebuild.

Again, Playground supports UIKit, but since SwiftUI can be quickly embedded in a UIKit component, we can use Playground for rapidly prototyping SwiftUI views too.

Getting ready

Create a Playground file (File | New | Playground) in Xcode called SwiftUIPlayground.

How to do it

The power of Playground is that you can make a change and immediately see the result. Importing the PlaygroundSupport framework, you can also render a UIViewController class to be shown during the Playground session.

We are going to define a simple SwiftUI view to be rendered in Playground:

1. Let's start by importing the needed frameworks:

   import PlaygroundSupport
   import SwiftUI

2. Then we create an extension to the Text component...