Swift Developers Can Now Develop Windows Apps
Good news for Swift developers, you can now develop Windows apps using your language of choice. And having more choices as to what programming language to use is always good news for all app developers regardless of platforms.
The team behind Swift has recently announced the release of Swift toolchain images for Windows, this includes multiple components that are required for developing and running Swift code on the Windows operating system.
According to a blog post from Swift Core team member Saleem Abdulrasool:
“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.”
In a video, Abdulrasool goes into the technical details in porting Swift to Windows which you can watch below:
The Swift toolchain was demonstrated by developing a simple calculator app using Swift and Visual Studio 2019. The calculator was built using CMake, but Abdulrasool says that a Swift Package Manager support will be coming soon and it will support application development using Swift builds.
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One Company, Readdle, the company that developed the Spark email app, is currently working on building a cross-platform version of their popular email client.
Abdulrasool says porting Swift to Windows is over a year’s worth of work, and Swift for Windows is just the start and that it’s one of the first few steps where Swift can be considered a core Windows app development language.
Swift was made open source way back in 2015 by Apple so that “the entire developer community can contribute to the programming language and help bring it to even more platforms,” according to Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi.
You can download the Swift toolchain for Windows 10 here.
Image Credits: littlebitesofcocoa
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