Swift is a high-performance system programming language. It has a clean
and modern syntax, offers seamless access to existing C and Objective-C code
and frameworks, and is memory-safe by default.
Although inspired by Objective-C and many other languages, Swift is not itself a
C-derived language. As a complete and independent language, Swift packages core
features like flow control, data structures, and functions, with high-level
constructs like objects, protocols, closures, and generics. Swift embraces
modules, eliminating the need for headers and the code duplication they entail.
To learn more about the programming language, visit swift.org.
To be a truly great community, Swift.org needs to welcome
developers from all walks of life, with different backgrounds, and with a wide
range of experience. A diverse and friendly community will have more great
ideas, more unique perspectives, and produce more great code. We will work
diligently to make the Swift community welcoming to everyone.
To give clarity of what is expected of our members, Swift has adopted the
code of conduct defined by the Contributor Covenant. This document is used
across many open source communities, and we think it articulates our values
well. For more, see the Code of Conduct.
Building a toolchain as a one-off: Follow the Getting Started guide
up until the "Building the project" section. After that, follow the
instructions in the Swift Toolchains section below.
We also have an FAQ that answers common questions.
Swift Toolchains
Building
Swift toolchains are created using the script
build-toolchain. This
script is used by swift.org's CI to produce snapshots and can allow for one to
locally reproduce such builds for development or distribution purposes. A typical
invocation looks like the following:
$ ./swift/utils/build-toolchain $BUNDLE_PREFIX
where $BUNDLE_PREFIX is a string that will be prepended to the build
date to give the bundle identifier of the toolchain's Info.plist. For
instance, if $BUNDLE_PREFIX was com.example, the toolchain
produced will have the bundle identifier com.example.YYYYMMDD. It
will be created in the directory you run the script with a filename
of the form: swift-LOCAL-YYYY-MM-DD-a-osx.tar.gz.
Beyond building the toolchain, build-toolchain also supports the
following (non-exhaustive) set of useful options:
--dry-run: Perform a dry run build. This is off by default.
--test: Test the toolchain after it has been compiled. This is off by default.
--distcc: Use distcc to speed up the build by distributing the C++ part of
the swift build. This is off by default.
--sccache: Use sccache to speed up subsequent builds of the compiler by
caching more C++ build artifacts. This is off by default.
More options may be added over time. Please pass --help to
build-toolchain to see the full set of options.
Installing into Xcode
On macOS if one wants to install such a toolchain into Xcode:
Untar and copy the toolchain to one of /Library/Developer/Toolchains/ or
~/Library/Developer/Toolchains/. E.g.:
$ sudo tar -xzf swift-LOCAL-YYYY-MM-DD-a-osx.tar.gz -C /
$ tar -xzf swift-LOCAL-YYYY-MM-DD-a-osx.tar.gz -C ~/
The script also generates an archive containing debug symbols which
can be installed over the main archive allowing symbolication of any
compiler crashes.
$ sudo tar -xzf swift-LOCAL-YYYY-MM-DD-a-osx-symbols.tar.gz -C /
$ tar -xzf swift-LOCAL-YYYY-MM-DD-a-osx-symbols.tar.gz -C ~/
Specify the local toolchain for Xcode's use via Xcode->Toolchains.
