| Apple Open Sources Swift Build |
| Written by Alex Denham | |||
| Thursday, 06 February 2025 | |||
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Apple has announced that it is open sourcing Swift Build, an extensible build engine that provides a set of build rules for building Swift projects. Swift is Apple's language that was originally developed as an alternative language to Objective C. Swift's designers aim is to provide a single language including the best ideas from languages such as C# and JavaScript, while being easy to use. It was made open source by Apple in 2015.  Swift Build is the engine used by Xcode, which Apple says supports millions of apps in the App Store as well as the internal build process for Apple’s own operating systems. The open source repository also includes support for targeting Linux and Windows. Swift Build is also used by Swift Playground and the Swift Package Manager. Swift Build is now available on GitHub, and has been made open source under the Apache 2.0 license. In addition to supporting iOS as a target, developers can choose from plugins for a number of operating systems including Android, Linux, QNX and Windows. QNX is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system aimed primarily at the embedded systems market, and while developers may be unconvinced the Swift will ever conquer wider operating system markets such as Android, Linux and Windows, the embedded market seems a more viable development.
Build systems are used to transform inputs such as a project description and source code into output artifacts like command line tools, libraries, and applications, and Apple points out that the performance and reliability of a build system has a direct impact on developer productivity. Swift Build is a component designed to plan and execute builds requested by a higher-level client like Swift Package Manager or Xcode. It builds on top of the existing llbuild project to add a variety of capabilities, starting with close integration with the Swift compiler to coordinate the build of Swift projects. llbuild is Apple's low-level build system, used by Xcode and the Swift Package Manager. Swift Build comes with support for a wide variety of product types including libraries, command line tools, and GUI applications with advanced build configuration options. It is also used to build graph optimizations that maximize the amount of parallelism when building Swift and C code. Swift Build is on GitHub now. More InformationRelated ArticlesSwift 6 Adds Concurrent Code Mode Swift 5.5 Adds Concurrency Support Swift 5.2 Improves Performance Swift Adds More Generics Support To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. 
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