Apple makes Swift Build open source; Swift Playgrounds slightly renamed

Over the weekend, Apple announced that it is making Swift Build open source. This is the build engine used by both Xcode and for the company’s internal projects.

Apple has also made a tiny name change to Swift Playgrounds, the app that helps people learn to code in Swift on iPad and Mac …

Apple makes Swift Build open source

Apple made the announcement on Saturday.

As Swift expands, there’s value in investing in matching cross-platform build tools that provide a powerful, consistent, and flexible experience across the ecosystem.

As a foundational step in this new chapter of Swift build technologies, today Apple is open sourcing Swift Build, a powerful and extensible build engine that provides a set of build rules for building Swift projects. Swift Build is the engine used by Xcode, which supports millions of apps in the App Store as well as the internal build process for Apple’s own operating systems. 

The company said that this would remove the confusion caused by having two different build packages, and pave the way for new features.

Compared to the build engine in Xcode, the build engine in Swift Package Manager is fairly simple. On Apple platforms, having two different ways to build packages has also led to user confusion when the two implementations’ behavior didn’t match. Contributing Xcode’s build engine to the Swift project and developing it in open source alongside the Swift compiler provides the tools necessary to address these problems and deliver a great builds experience to all Swift users.

[This] lays the foundation to enable new features and improvements across all platforms and tools, and unlocks new performance optimizations and developer-facing features.

Swift Build is now available on GitHub.

Swift Playgrounds becomes Swift Playground

John Gruber spotted that Apple has also updated Swift Playground, and in the process changed it from plural to singular.

Interesting detail with the latest update to Apple’s app for learning and tinkering with Swift: it’s now named Playground, singular, not Playgrounds, plural. I’m not going to argue that much should be made of the name change, but I like it. The app is the playground — a place for playing with Swift — not a factory for making playgrounds.

Image: Apple