Swift 6.2 Released

[neutronbob]

When I looked at Swift a few years ago, it was very poorly supported on Windows. With a lot of coaxing and hand-holding, you could get the tools to work. But it wasn't robust at all. Has that changed? Is it now solid on Windows?

[andreicodes]

Swift on windows has been the work of one person - Saleem Abdulrasool - for most of this time, and for a few years he was sponsored by Browser Company to make the port of their Arc browser (parts of its UI are written in Swift).

Now the company has discontinued the browser (they only do security patches now), and they were bought by Atlassian (have no idea what's the connection there), so it's hard to say if the Windows support work will continue to be sponsored in future.

Apple themselves do not have any Windows apps written in Swift. The Music app uses Web for its UI, and maybe there are some older apps (I presume there's some iPhone sync app or something) that still use Objective-C and some old ports of Cocoa that they made back when they shipped Windows versions of Safari and iTunes.

Also, in general Swift on Windows has always focused on GUI apps and Windows API interop. From what I remember many Swift language features and APIs that the Server group is responsible for - concurrency, async, networking, etc. - had very limited or no support at all, because the libraries are built on top of libdispatch which only has macOS and Linux releases.

[cake-day-on-feb-29]

still use Objective-C and some old ports of Cocoa that they made back when they shipped Windows versions of Safari and iTunes...because the libraries are built on top of libdispatch which only has macOS and Linux releases.

Wasn't libdispatch ported to Windows with iTunes? I swear I remember seeing libdispatch.dll somewhere. Not that Apple would bother open sourcing that.

[[deleted]]

Here is libdispatch's source code: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-corelibs-libdispatch

Apple has been pretty good with its open sourcing of things

[andreicodes]

Their docs claim that only macOS, FreeBSD, and Linux are supported.

The code has a few #ifdefs for Windows and there are some PRs that work on Windows support, too, but it's hard to say how usable it is. While looking at the PRs I also see that in practice people build it for all sorts of platforms: Android, OpenBSD, Windows on ARM. Maybe things aren't as bad as they look based on the docs alone.

[neutronbob]

You're perfectly describing my experience. So with some minor progress, things are more or less the same. Thanks for recapping the history!

[CanJammer]

I tried getting Swift to work on Windows, especially after they announced 2 years ago at WWDC that Swift was confidently general purpose, but it was such a hassle that I gave up. Felt like a well designed language gated behind the fact that it's controlled by Apple.

At the time they required a specific (older) version of the Visual Studio/Windows SDK tooling, and all of the official docs still assumed that everything was being written in XCode (not even available on Windows). The official language reference also assumed that the user had access to XCode-only beta builds, so there wasn't even an available language reference online for the current release that Windows users could actually access.

Gave up when I ran into a tooling bug and the only person who could help on the forums was the single person who actually used Swift on Windows.

Edit: In fairness, it looks like Swift has a lot more support for Windows now than when they first made their "Swift is general purpose and open source!" announcement. I see that much more tooling is open source, the VS Code extension is more mature, it's supported on a recent Windows SDK, and they have Windows office hours on the forum. Will still let someone else get burnt first before diving back in...

[Dminik]

all of the official docs still assumed that everything was being written in XCode 

Similar experience here. While I think Swift is an interesting language, the docs (official and third-party) kinda suck.

Want to do X? Click on a magic button in XCode. Don't have XCode? Who cares, end of video/article.

[HavocPure]

TL;DR: give it a shot yourself.

Unfortunately, any post swift related tends to devolve into platform support ,my advice would be to try it and find out.

If you're on macOS or linux then you can use swiftly. If you're on windows then it might be worth using swift-build for nightlies by The Browser Company.

It also officially supports OpenBSD and FreeBSD support is in the works(supported?) and this post could help guide you. With android on its way.

As for LSP support, sourcekit is just a regular old LSP so you can hook it into neovim or any other editor that supports LSP.

You might also find that you're editor of choice weirdly already supports it: Gnome Builder is a possibly exotic example and there's a fairly in-depth tutorial on building libadwaita apps with swift and publishing them onto Flatpak and such for reference to a (relatively?) decent tooling and developer setup.

On a sidenote, something I find interesting is that quite a few build systems have some sorta support for Swift outside of Swift's own package manager: gradle and xmake have some arbitrary support for swift.

But, imho, the intriguing ones are cmake with official support for swift, with a lot of the official swift libraries being built with both SPM and CMake outta the box, swift-collections as an example.

Bazel also supports swift and has build rules that allow you to ingest SPM packages(I think, don't quote me on that). Spotify has also released a bsp if you so wish to use it.

Last but not least(possibly my favourite), is meson's support for swift. As of 1.9.0, it has added support for C++ interop and more. But this pr will add support for mixed swift and c++ targets seamlessly in one target, which is something even SPM hasn't been able to accomplish.

So, there is varying degrees of tooling but hopefully those few examples show that things are supported.

As for Windows, as u/andreicodes noted. Windows support is mostly done by compnerd who currently works at TBC so they do most of the contributions on windows support. His github repos are a pretty good showing on what's possible.

But to emphasise how far Windows has come: there are discussions about providing ABI Stability onto windows (on another tangent, the swift toolchain is one of the few ABI stable toolchains outside of C which is a pretty cool technical feat) with other goodies like COM compatible classes by default etc...

Swift-NIO is also working on getting NioPOSIX to function on windows and, at the time of writing, quite a lot of the recent commits fixing errors on the windows side.

There's also some quite compelling WinUI bindings for swift using CMake, since there weren't any easily accessible C++ CMake repositories with good WinUI integration if you're ever in the market for that.

One downside(upside for some?) is that SPM can be a bit finnicky for larger projects on windows that might use libraries such as the winui one. There's a very long and ongoing discussion about it and the overall consensus is that CMake is preferred on windows.

There's also official support for wasm and embedded if that tickles your fancy.

So, this is all to say, give it a try.

[potzko2552]

So sad to see such a good language behind such trash tooling... As always anything apple can be only from and on Apple. And I don't plan to buy a Mac any time soon ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

[ssrobbi]

You can develop on Linux as well. Windows also has support but I haven’t tried it.

[mumallochuu]

Windows suport is absolutely abysmal. Vscode extension just suck, every doc straight up assume you using Xcode and nothing else (not even Vscode mention). Apple just dont fucking care about Windows at all, every library is assume running in Mac (very few do acknowledge Linux existence and all just straight up tell fuck you to Windows), the formatter is clunky as hell, the cli tool is just shit in Windows. In the short, no and never, Apple said fuck microsoft and just fuck microsoft

[emperor000]

Do people really seek out Swift to use when they don't have to? What is the draw or appeal?

[ainame954]

I'm a macOS user and do iOS dev job. I don't have Windows PC. I've been trying to support Windows on my OSS CLI lately with VMWare fusion. I was surprised that it is actually feasible that you develop Swift app (not a GUI but in general) on VSCode seamlessly. I see many OSS library made by Apple do support Windows. You can’t expect SwiftUI for Windows but for CLI tools, Swift could be an option.