Apple announces that FreeBSD is a supported platform for Swift 6.2.

[majortom]

At WWDC last week, Apple announced that FreeBSD is an officially supported platform.

Nice to see this happen! Hope they will ensure that FreeBSD OCI containers will work on their new open source containerization framework and maybe even enables FreeBSD as a host platform for it.

 

[Beastie7]

YES! I'm so happy about this.

 

[majortom]

It will be quite nice to have it, especially with the new sub-process function. I want to use it for the server side components of a few systems.

 

[cracauer@]

Apple was also quite prominent on BSDCan last week.

 

[majortom]

Apple was also quite prominent on BSDCan last week.

What did they have to show?

 

[cracauer@]

What did they have to show?

Big sponsorship, person present. No talk, though.

 

[majortom]

Big sponsorship, person present. No talk, though.

Interesting. I hope this encourages them to increase support for FreeBSD in other areas, and maybe even contribute to the Foundation! :-D

 

[XNUKory]

Apple has significantly increased C++ inter making Swift is a good replacement C++ successor language. I hope it catches on.

 

[majortom]

Apple has significantly increased C++ inter making Swift is a good replacement C++ successor language. I hope it catches on.

Swift is now supported on All of Apple’s operating systems, FreeBSD, most embedded CPUs, Linux, WebAssembly and Windows. That is a pretty good starting point.

 

[Beastie7]

Just an FYI. Swift is now available as a package on FreeBSD! Now we get to toy with it on macOS and FreeBSD.

 

[jardows]

This sounds interesting. I'd like to get into some programming, learn C, etc. Swift certainly sounds interesting as an option. Will this be something we can make FreeBSD programs on, or is it mainly going to be programming iOS apps on FreeBSD?

 

[cracauer@]

Will this be something we can make FreeBSD programs on, or is it mainly going to be programming iOS apps on FreeBSD?

Certainly no IOS target on FreeBSD.

 

[sidetone]

Apple has significantly increased C++ inter making Swift is a good replacement C++ successor language. I hope it catches on.

I'm not sure about that. Swift, even though open source, is meant for Macs and i products.

It makes development licensing cheaper for developers or students. A lot of programs in Swift use the closed source Cocoa framework. One way it works is, there'll be a network of computers all running Swift, where everyone programs Swift on, then, one computer that has Cocoa. They'll send their Swift programs to the computer which runs Cocoa which they need to run. Cheaper licensing costs and improved development ability.This way, they don't have to buy licensing rights to run Cocoa on all computers on that network for development and teaching. The FreeBSD or other opensource machines act as satellites to the Mac computer. It's a cool concept.

There's other ways to use Swift though.

Swift has its niche as for web apps on iPads and overall programs on Macs.

It will be relevant to Macs and i-products for quite some time. I doubt it will be mainstream for general purpose programming though.

Who knows if there will be an alternative open source framework to Cocoa for other purposes. At least LLVM and Clang initially got donated to open source by Apple. They needed an open source LLVM for Swift.

 

[NiftySpace]

Note that the Swift toolchain now supports cross-compiling to FreeBSD, so you can build your code on a Mac or Linux system and run it on FreeBSD. This requires generating a Swift SDK, which is a quick and automated process done by this program here: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-sdk-generator

Unfortunately, there are currently no releases of Swift for FreeBSD available on swift.org, so if you want the toolchain to be able to use the Swift standard library functions, you need to build the toolchain yourself.