Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

The goal for Swift should (and seems) to be to gradually separate itself from XCode, which is holding it back from its ambitions.

XCode has been compared to many things, but at 3.1 stars on the App store, one must find that it is still slightly overrated.

Swift hasn’t required Xcode for several years now. It has robust command line tooling and a VSCode plugin.

https://www.swift.org/documentation/articles/getting-started...

I believe it still does at least for iOS, or it did last time I checked (for a Swift library I was writing).

Despite being terrible, the last time I checked, the experience in Xcode was somehow still meaningfully better than with the VSCode plugin

Hence this announcement is great, since it seems to say they’re (going to?) support building GUI apps with SwiftPM and/or the newly open sourced build tool.

Building Swift code for iOS without going through xcodebuild is sort of obnoxious but is possible. You do need to have a copy of Xcode installed regardless of programming language simply because the iOS SDKs aren't distributed separately.

SwiftPM has always supported building GUI apps.

What don’t you like about the VSCode plugin?

I feel like Swift is being held hostage by Apple. I can't get get the next version of Swift, because it's being distributed with a higher version of Xcode that only runs on an OS version I don't want to install (yet), and even if I did, I'd first have to buy a new Mac for that. That trick seems to work with enough developers to make Apple ever more rich and powerful and even more arrogant (if that's possible at all), but it doesn't work with me. As much as I appreciate Swift, I will only ever use it on my terms, not on Apple's.

> As much as I appreciate Swift, I will only ever use it on my terms, not on Apple's.

Apple's ethos for a long time have been "On our terms only", for almost everything they've built. Why would they treat Swift any differently?

While i am sympathetic to you, you have to see that you represent a vanishing small use case for them.

Isn't that their complaint though? They don't want to participate in a language where they can only ever be a second class citizen.

This isn’t true, you can get the next version of Swift by downloading a pkg installer from https://www.swift.org/install/macos/

You can get it bundled with Xcode as well if you’d like, but it’s not necessary.

> I'd first have to buy a new Mac for that

Which means you are running Mojave and your Mac is at least 6 years old.

I wouldn't expect anyone to support developers who are running a two generation old OS.

I can run the latest version of my OS of choice on hardware twice that old.

This is only a problem that Apple has created to help them sell hardware. These days, a 6-year-old laptop is still a perfectly capable machine.

But you cannot run the product on an iDevice and a build for Mac Catalyst isn't even possible. “Bundled with Xcode” is very much necessary.

Using XCode is... unfortunate. Used it for only 10 minutes today and had a crash. Performance was very bad.

(Here's a bad one: I accidentally copied a whole file into the Find and Replace box. Instant Freeze and 1 frame per minute response.)

Swift isn't the one being held hostage, it's iOS development.

For me it just spins forever and never manages to do any LSP things

And it is still a perfectly capable machine.

But you can't expect Apple to support it as a development platform. Especially when they want you to use the latest SDKs which only work on newer machines.

If you haven’t tried recently I’d give it another go. A lot of work has gone in to the LSP this past year to stabilize it and improve performance.

Pretty similar to the Xcode experience, then

I find Xcode completion and especially doc lookup pretty good. It’s not as good as being able to jump straight into framework source code like with Android Studio but better than pretty much anything in VS Code in any language.

That is, as long as there’re no type errors in my code… once I get a little too creative in SwiftUI all bets are off.

It’s Xcode.

You're moving the goal posts. I'm not interested in SDKs that cannot work on a given OS or CPU, I just want to update the compiler to make use of progress in the language, without being forced by Apple to buy new hardware for that, or install a different OS. You pretending these things cannot be separated looks deeply disingenuous.