For those unaware, Swift is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Apple Inc., first released in 2014. Initially a proprietary language, Swift was made open-source software under the Apache License 2.0 on December 3, 2015, for Apple’s platforms and Linux. “Porting Swift to Windows is not about simply porting the compiler, but rather ensuring that the full ecosystem is available on the platform. This includes the compiler, the standard library, and the core libraries (dispatch, Foundation, XCTest). These libraries are part of what enables developers to write powerful applications with ease and without having to worry about many of the details of the underlying system,” Saleem Abdulrasool, Swift Core Team member and software engineer at Google Brain, wrote in the blog post. With these core libraries and the flexible interoperability of Swift with C, it is possible to develop applications on Windows purely in Swift while taking advantage of the existing corpus of libraries on the Windows platforms. The blog post goes on to demonstrate a basic calculator app that was written entirely in Swift. This project was built using the Swift toolchain on Windows, as well as installation of Visual Studio 2019. Although the demo application is built with CMake, Swift Package Manager support on Windows is coming soon, Abdulrasool notes. “Adding support for Windows to Swift is the beginning of a journey. The current support sets the first milestone where the language is usable. There is yet another even broader part of the ecosystem like lldb and the Swift Package Manager which still need more work to be as complete in their support for this different platform,” he adds. You can download the Swift toolchain for Windows from the Swift Project website. For information about how to use Swift on Windows, you can go to the Getting Started section. For the early adopters who are getting started and finding issues, you can report them to the Swift Bug Tracker.
