Explore the wonderful world of advanced Swift.

Point-Free is a video series exploring advanced topics in the Swift programming language, hosted by industry experts, Brandon and Stephen.

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Episode 327 • Jun 2, 2025

How does our SQL-based solution for persistence compare with modern SwiftData? We put things to the test by rebuilding our complex @FetchAll query using @Model and the @Query macro!

Free 1 hr 16 min
Episode 315 • Mar 3, 2025

We finish a sneak peek of our upcoming Structured Queries library by showing how queries built with the library can be reused and composed together, and how we can replace all of the raw queries in our application with simpler, safer query builders.

Free 42 min
Episode 314 • Feb 24, 2025

Last week we released SharingGRDB, an alternative to SwiftData powered by SQLite, but there are a few improvements we could make. Let’s take a look at some problems with the current tools before giving a sneak peek at the solution: a powerful new query building library that leverages many advanced Swift features that we will soon build from scratch.

Free 40 min

All episodes

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Episode 329 • Jun 30, 2025

We go live with our viewers to unveil our vision for modern persistence. We show just how easy it is to seamlessly synchronize your app’s data across many devices, including sharing data with other iCloud users, and we answer your questions.

Subscriber-only 1 hr 49 min
Episode 328 • Jun 16, 2025

We conclude our series on “modern persistence” with advanced queries that leverage reusable SQL builders, “safe” SQL strings, and complex aggregations, including JSON arrays and a query that selects many stats in a single query.

Subscriber-only 53 min
Episode 327 • Jun 2, 2025

How does our SQL-based solution for persistence compare with modern SwiftData? We put things to the test by rebuilding our complex @FetchAll query using @Model and the @Query macro!

Free 1 hr 16 min

What to expect

New content regularly

We dissect some of the most important and interesting topics in Swift programming frequently, and deliver them straight to your inbox.

Wide variety of topics

We cover both abstract ideas and practical concepts you can start using in your code base immediately.

Playground downloads

Download a fully-functioning Swift playground from the episode so you can experiment with the concepts discussed.

Video transcripts

We transcribe each video by hand so you can search and reference easily. Click on a timestamp to jump directly to that point in the video.

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Back to basics

Collection

The Swift language has grown over the years and become more and more powerful. It now boosts a comprehensive static type system (generics, existentials…), a suite of concurrency tools (actors, dynamic isolation…), and most recently even ownership capabilities (consuming, borrowing, non-copyable types…). In “Back to basics” we will focus on just one part of the language in order to uncover the deep theory behind that feature as well as provide concrete advice for writing real-world code.

8 episodes 4 hr 46 min

UIKit

Collection

SwiftUI may be all the rage these days, but that doesn’t mean you won’t occassionally need to dip your toes into the UIKit waters. Whether it be to access some functionality not yet available in SwiftUI, or for performance reasons (UICollectionView 😍), you will eventually find yourself subclassing UIViewController, and then the question becomes: what is the most modern way to do this?

9 episodes 5 hr 28 min

Concurrency

Collection

Swift has many tools for concurrency, including threads, operation queues, dispatch queues, Combine and now first class tools built directly into the language. We start from the beginning to understand what the past tools excelled at and where they faultered in order to see why the new tools are so incredible.

12 episodes 9 hr 3 min

A better way to create SwiftUI bindings

If you have ever created a binding using the get:set: initializer, you may want to reconsider. Doing so can hurt SwiftUI’s ability to animate your view. Luckily there is a better way. You can leverage @dynamicMemberLookup and subscripts to derive new bindings in a way that allows SwiftUI to propertly track where the binding came from.

Watch 7 min

Why you can't use enums in SwiftData

SwiftData is not capable of filtering and sorting by raw representable enum properties in models. Predicates and sort descriptors will compile just fine when referencing enum properties, but it will crash at runtime.

Watch 1 min

Why you can't use booleans in SwiftData

SwiftData is not capable of sorting by boolean properties in models. And if you try to trick SwiftData to allow it, you will encounter runtime crashes.

Watch 9 min

What people are saying

Meghan Kane
@meghafon

Really love this episode - thanks @mbrandonw + @stephencelis! Understanding Swift types in terms of algebraic data types is such an elegant way of seeing the # of possible values your Swift types will represent 🤯 #Simplifyallthethings #GoodbyeComplexity

Arjun Nayini
@anayini

We have this thing called WWTV at #PlanGrid where we mostly just listen to @mbrandonw and @stephencelis talk about functions.

Mike Abidakun
@mabidakun

Every episode has been amazing on Pointfree, yet somehow, you've managed to make these Parser combinator episodes even better!!! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Luca Ceppelli
@lucaceppelli

I bought the annual subscription and after I watched all videos and played with the sample code and libraries I can say it was the best money I spent in the last 12 months.

William Savary
@NSHumanBeing

Just became a subscriber! I'm binge watching episodes now! Great content! I'm learning so much from you guys. The repo for the site is the best go-to reference for a well done project and swift-web is something I am definitely going to use in my projects. Thanks for everything!

Ferran Pujol Camins
@ferranpujolca

Through videos you constantly introduce ideas and patterns only to later reformulate them into more general ideas. This is awesome and helped me understand a lot of programming concepts. Well done!

Christina Lee
@RunChristinaRun

I listened to the first two episodes of @pointfreeco this weekend and it was the best presentation of FP fundamentals I've seen. Very thoughtful layout and progression of the material and motivations behind each introduced concept. Looking forward to watching the rest!

Ferran Pujol Camins
@ferranpujolca

Their content pushes the boundary of my knowledge, and it's fun to watch!

Oscar Alvarez
@iOjCaR

So many concepts presented at #WWDC19 reminded me of @pointfreeco video series. 👏👏 So happy I watched it before coming to San Jose.

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