Swift for Windows arrives at last, but as an unofficial port

Ngoc Huynh

Developers who want to try out Apple’s language on Windows can get started with this unofficial port, but an official version is unlikely until Swift 3.0.

An open source effort to port Apple’s Swift language to Windows last week released new versions of both source code and binaries.

Swift was originally developed by Apple as a replacement for the Objective-C language used to develop apps for iOS. But after it was released as an open source project, Swift quickly gained traction outside of iOS developer circles — for example, when IBM created a cloud-hosted development environment for Swift.

Versions of the language already exist for Mac OS X and Linux, but until now no open source port of Apple’s Swift code to Windows was available or announced. An official Windows release might still be forthcoming, but in the meantime this version — which does not appear to be sponsored or developed by anyone from Apple or Microsoft — claims to provide basic Swift functionality on 64-bit Windows 10.

The Windows port is available on GitHub in its original incarnation, and prebuilt binaries are available using both Microsoft Visual C++ and Cygwin (although the MSVC builds are likely to be more reliable). Another project on Microsoft’s CodePlex hub provides a Windows compiler for Swift, with a simple GUI for ease of use.

The most recent build of Swift for Windows requires Visual Studio 2015 and LLVM 3.8.0 to compile Swift source code to binaries. To run the Swift interpreter, you need only the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015. Compiling and linking with both static and dynamic libraries is supported.

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Source : http://www.infoworld.com/