• Swift is growing in popularity as a cross-platform language with support on various embedded devices, form factors (wearables to server), and operating systems.
• Apple is open sourcing Swift Build, a powerful and extensible build engine used by Xcode and supporting Linux and Windows.
• The build system's primary responsibility is to transform user inputs into output artifacts and plays an important role in the developer experience and productivity.
• Swift Build builds on llbuild and adds capabilities like robust integration with the Swift compiler, support for various product types, and build graph optimizations.
• Contributing Xcode's build engine to Swift and developing it in open source helps address user confusion and provides a unified build execution engine across platforms.
• With this release, SwiftPM has the opportunity to offer a unified build engine, and a pull request is submitted to integrate Swift Build.
• This is an important step in enabling a healthy package ecosystem and the team will share more details on the Swift forums and welcome feedback.
• The swift-build repository is available on GitHub with README and documentation on building and contributing, and pull requests and issues are welcome on the Swift forum.