Swift 6 coming soon?

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Is anyone doing development with Swift?

When are we going to have Swift 6?

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Swift needs serious clean‐up, potentially a full rewrite, and solving the mysterious Hydra build issues. There are a couple of people who have expressed interest in doing so for 25.05 in the Nix on macOS Matrix room and I’d like to assist such efforts, which should be easier now that Randy’s macOS SDK rework is in.

The plan would ideally be to update to 5.10, the last version that can be bootstrapped without an existing Swift compiler, and then use that to build Swift 6. If you’re interested in helping out then come say hi on Matrix!

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What qualifications would be needed to be helpful in this mission?

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Knowing things about the Swift build system would be a big help! Experience with Nix packaging would also of course be necessary, and we’d want to make modifications to the existing LLVM package infrastructure to accommodate Swift’s fork. However we already have lots of people with extensive experience with Nixpkgs and LLVM and relatively few with interest and knowledge of the Swift compiler and its build system and bootstrap process, so that’s the skill that would help the effort most on the margin.

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I guess I am not there yet.

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Another way one could help is by having a body of Swift code that can be tested with the packaged compiler. If Swift support is going to be reworked, it’s an opportunity to improve things for Swift users.

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I did a quick search and it seems there aren’t much swift project available in nixpkgs.

If my pull request got merged then then mas package can be tested on:

I have never worked with nixpkgs before though so I can’t guarantee it.

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I’ve started work on cleaning up Swift, so I can update it to Swift 6.1. I am targeting it for 25.11, though I expect it to land sooner rather than later.

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