Apple’s Swift language comes to Windows
More work remains to be done in the porting effort, but Windows support is now good enough for early adopters to get started
By Paul Krill
Editor at Large, InfoWorld | SEP 24, 2020 10:57 AM PDT
The Apple-developed Swift programming language is now available on Windows, after a significant porting effort that has taken more than a year. Windows support has reached a stage where early adopters can now use Swift to build experiences for Windows, the project reports.
Downloadable images of the Swift 5.3 toolchain for Windows 10 were introduced September 22. The porting effort set about to ensure that the full ecosystem is available on Windows: the compiler, the standard library, and the full core libraries including dispatch, Foundation, and XCTest. These libraries enable developers to more easily write applications without having to deal with many underlying system details.
Current support for Swift is just the beginning. The broader ecosystem, such as lldb and the Swift Package Manager, still need more work. Early adopters such as Readdle have experimented with cross-platform applications in Swift, bringing many Swift libraries to Windows.
Introduced in June 2014 as a successor to Objective-C, Swift has been available for use with the Apple macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS platforms and with Linux. Swift 5.3 was released September 16, focused on language refinements that reduce the amount of boilerplate and redundant code developers must write. Runtime performance is addressed as well.
