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.

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.

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