Spade is Moving to Codeberg

After six years on gitlab, it is time to move Spade development over to Codeberg under https://codeberg.org/spade-lang/

Update Existing Spade Projects

Unfortunately, this move comes with a small breaking change for existing users. First, update swim to the latest version by running

cargo install --git https://codeberg.org/spade-lang/swim

If you have any projects that were created before September 18 2026 in which you want to update the Spade version , you have to run

swim clean

before running

swim update-spade

Backstory

Six years ago when I started the Spade project, the choice of git forge essentially came down to GitHub or GitLab. I have never been a fan of microsoft, so I chose GitLab even if that meant less discoverability. However, I never liked gitlab, the interface was always confusing and slow. The only thing it had going for it was being open source and not microsoft.

Fast forward six years, gitlab’s interface somehow got even worse, and now they are trying to shove AI down our throat. Luckily, there is now a third option: Codeberg. It is run by a small european non-profit, they reject LLMs, and unlike gitlab I actually really like the interface!

The big downside is that codeberg is a small operation run by volunteers on donated hardware, so under load things can slow down and their uptime isn’t amazing, but hey, 96% is a hell of a lot better than whatever sub 90% GitHub has achieved :)

CI

With Codeberg being resource constrained, they have very limited CI resources which has kept us on gitlab for the past few months. Luckily, we are able to solve that now. First, https://www.lysator.liu.se/, a student association at my old university offered to let us use some of their compute servers for CI. Second, https://felinebuildservices.org/ is slowly ramping up and is also generously providing Spade with CI. Thanks!

Funnily enough, these two volunteer run systems are significantly faster than whatever runners GitLab has available!