| Apple Adds Swift Version Manager |
| Written by Kay Ewbank |
| Thursday, 03 April 2025 |
|
Apple has announced the first stable release of Swiftly, a Swift version manager for installing, managing and updating Swift toolchains. 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.  Swiftly is bundled with Xcode for writing apps for Apple platforms, and has been around for some years as a community-supported tool for Swift developers using Linux.
The 'new' part of this release is that it now comes with official support from the Swift team as part of the core Swift toolchain, including hosting it as part of the Swift GitHub organization. The developers have also added macOS support to make it easier to install Swift separately from Xcode.
Swiftly is a CLI tool for installing, managing, and switching between Swift toolchains. It is written in Swift and is designed to be extremely easy to install and get running. The GitHub readme says Swiftly's command interface is intended to be flexible while also being simple to use.
The Swift development team says Swiftly differs from Swiftenv, an existing Swift version manager that already has much of the functionality that swiftly will eventually have, because Swiftly is now an official installation tool for Swift toolchains. Swiftly has helped to inform the creation of API endpoints maintained by the Swift project that it uses to retrieve information about what toolchains are available to install and to verify their expected signatures. swiftenv currently uses a third party API layer for this. Using an official API reduces the avenues for security vulnerabilities and also reduces the risk of downtime affecting Swift installations.
Swiftly also comes with support for installing and managing snapshot toolchains, and for updating toolchains. It is optimized for ease of installation and doesn't require any system dependencies to be installed on the user's system. Swiftly is available 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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