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Apple has Officially Open-Sourced Swift Build, the engine used by Apple's developer Xcode Tool, AppleCare will undergo changes this week+

1 cover Swift

 

On February 1, Apple announced that it has officially open-sourced the Xcode engine Swift Build , claiming it is "a foundational step in a new chapter of Swift build technology."

Swift Build is the engine used by Apple's developer tool Xcode, which powers millions of apps in the App Store and the internal build process for Apple's own operating systems. The open source repository also includes support for Linux and Windows.

The main responsibility of a build system is to transform user-authored inputs (such as project descriptions and source code) into output artifacts such as command-line tools, libraries, and applications. Swift Build is an infrastructure component designed to schedule and execute builds requested by higher-level clients such as the Swift Package Manager or Xcode. It builds on top of the existing llbuild project and adds the following features:

  • Integrates with the Swift compiler to coordinate the build of Swift projects
  • Supports multiple product types including libraries, command-line tools, and GUI applications with advanced build configuration options
  • Build graph optimizations to maximize parallelism when building Swift and C code

The build engine in the Swift Package Manager is fairly simple compared to the build engine in Xcode. On Apple platforms, there are two different ways to build packages, which can also lead to user confusion when the behavior of the two implementations doesn’t match .

Contributing Xcode's build engine to the Swift project and open-sourcing its development along with the Swift compiler provides the tools needed to address these issues and provide a better build experience for all Swift users.

With this release, Swift Package Manager now has the opportunity to provide a unified build execution engine on all platforms. This change can be made transparent to users and maintain full compatibility with all existing packages while providing a consistent cross-platform experience.

At the same time, it lays the foundation for enabling new features and improvements across all platforms and tools, and unlocks new performance optimizations and developer-facing capabilities.

As the first step towards realizing this vision, the Swift team has submitted a pull request to begin the process of integrating support for Swift Build as an alternative build engine in the Swift Package Manager.

By open-sourcing Swift Build, Apple aims to unify build execution across all platforms, making it easier for developers to work with Swift on Linux and Windows, in addition to Apple platforms. This move is expected to enhance compatibility and the cross-platform development experience. Github Swift-Build

In other Apple news today:

  • Starting next week, Apple's retail stores will no longer offer AppleCare+ plans as a one-time purchase, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
  • In his Power On newsletter, Gurman further stated that Apple plans to introduce a new iCloud-based service codenamed 'Confetti' for event invites.

 

10.0F - Apple News