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Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

(www.swift.org)
612 points dayanruben | 11 comments | 01 Feb 25 16:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.215s | source | bottom
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tux3 ◴[01 Feb 25 17:12 UTC] No.42899950[source]▶
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.

replies(4): >>42899981 #>>42901466 #>>42902607 #>>42906323 #
1. dlachausse ◴[01 Feb 25 17:15 UTC] No.42899981[source]▶
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...

replies(2): >>42900031 #>>42900176 #
2. tux3 ◴[01 Feb 25 17:20 UTC] No.42900031[source]▶
I believe it still does at least for iOS, or it did last time I checked (for a Swift library I was writing).
replies(2): >>42900198 #>>42900222 #
3. airstrike ◴[01 Feb 25 17:35 UTC] No.42900176[source]▶
Despite being terrible, the last time I checked, the experience in Xcode was somehow still meaningfully better than with the VSCode plugin
replies(1): >>42901419 #
4. jitl ◴[01 Feb 25 17:37 UTC] No.42900198[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>42900693 #
5. plorkyeran ◴[01 Feb 25 17:39 UTC] No.42900222[source]▶
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.
6. Zanfa ◴[01 Feb 25 18:23 UTC] No.42900693{3}[source]▶
SwiftPM has always supported building GUI apps.
7. rescripting ◴[01 Feb 25 19:38 UTC] No.42901419[source]▶
What don’t you like about the VSCode plugin?
replies(1): >>42903491 #
8. jitl ◴[01 Feb 25 23:10 UTC] No.42903491{3}[source]▶
For me it just spins forever and never manages to do any LSP things
replies(2): >>42903767 #>>42904388 #
9. rescripting ◴[01 Feb 25 23:40 UTC] No.42903767{4}[source]▶
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.
10. myko ◴[02 Feb 25 00:58 UTC] No.42904388{4}[source]▶
Pretty similar to the Xcode experience, then
replies(1): >>42904666 #
11. jitl ◴[02 Feb 25 01:32 UTC] No.42904666{5}[source]▶
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.