Programming

Quartz is a layer beneath SwiftUI or AppKit. SwiftUI is still using Quartz under the hood. The way you use Quartz directly from SwiftUI vs AppKit is a bit different, though still fairly similar. A more fair comparison of the SwiftUI code would be:

struct HelloWorldView: View {
  var body: some View {
    Canvas { context, _ in
      context.draw(
        Text("HelloWorld")
          .font(.system(size: 24))
          .foregroundColor(.black),
        at: CGPoint(x: 20, y: 20)
      )
    }
  }
}

Alternatively an AppKit solution (not using Quartz directly) would be something like:

class HelloWorldView: NSView {
  override init(frame frameRect: NSRect) {
    super.init(frame: frameRect)
    let text = NSAttributedString(
      string: “Hello World”,
      attributes: [.font: NSFont.systemFont(ofSize: 24), .foregroundColor: NSColor.black]
    )
    let label = NSTextField(labelWithAttributedString: text)
    addSubview(label)
  }

  required init?(coder: NSCoder) {
    fatalError()
  }
}

In either AppKit or SwiftUI, you can access Quartz directly to implement custom views. However, most of the time the UI code you write in either SwiftUI or AppKit won’t call Quartz directly at all, but will instead be composed of built-in views, like (NS)TextField or (NS)Button. Under the hood, SwiftUI is mainly just using the AppKit components at the moment, but provides a significantly nicer way to use them (especially in regards to layout and data synchronization).