Proposal: Add MLX Chat Example App to the Repository

[ibrahimcetin]

Hi, I developed an example chat app as I promised in this comment.

MLXChatExample App

MLX Chat Example is simple, practical, and modular. It supports both LLMs and VLMs, along with most features you’d expect from a modern chat app—cancellation, real-time generation, model switching, and chat clearing. The codebase is modular, with a clear separation between UI and business logic and it's well documented. However, it is not intended for production use—rather, I consider it a sandbox app for experimentation.

The Advantage of Structured Chat Messages

I developed this app to explore the benefits of structured chat messages. As shown here, this approach significantly simplifies the codebase and the usage of the package by abstracting away model-specific differences. It allows developers to easily use both LLMs and VLMs without having to manage model-specific chat structures manually.

One Problem

Initially, I tried creating this app inside the existing package (in the Applications folder), but I ran into issues binding the frameworks (MLXLLM, MLXVLM, MLXLMCommon) to the application target and couldn't find a solution. Here are the steps I followed:

1. Open mlx-swift-examples.xcodeproj in Xcode
2. Add a new target to the project
3. Select “App” from the templates
4. Create a SwiftUI project named MLXChatExample
5. Go to Frameworks, Libraries, and Embedded Content, click the plus button
6. Xcode should list the products from mlx-swift-examples, but they aren't shown—so I can't add them

I tried removing and re-adding the local package (which resets references in existing projects), and after that, Xcode successfully listed the products. However, this approach modifies the .xcodeproj file unnecessarily. Aside from that workaround, I haven’t found a clean solution.

What am I doing wrong?
Is there a proper way to add this project to the package as an example?
Or should we even include example apps directly in the package?

Conclusion

I believe mlx-swift-examples could really benefit from an example like this. If I can solve the integration issue, I'd love to contribute this app to the repository. But I also think it’s worth discussing whether we want to include these kinds of examples directly within the package.

[davidkoski]

What am I doing wrong?

I think the problem is how I set up the Package.swift as a local package. The goal is to make the xcodeproj build using the swiftpm version of the libraries -- we were seeing some inconsistencies in the builds when it was built both as an xcodeproj target and a swiftpm target.

The problem is that the target don't appear for local linking for some reason. I am pretty sure this is a bit of an abuse of how the local path is working.

Anyway, you aren't doing anything wrong. I think the project has problems.

OK, that said, it is possible to do it, but dirty. You can add 3 other projects, e.g. MLXFast, MLXRandom and MLXFFT. Then you can edit the xcodeproj in a text editor and replace those with the correct references. Not great, but until I figure out a better way to represent this it is the best we have. If you want to set up a PR I am happy to make these edits.

[davidkoski]

I have a little chat command line tool that I have been tinkering with today -- let me get a PR ready for that and we can discuss.

[davidkoski]

See #277