Apple's Swift programming language and Google's Flutter UI framework for its Dart programming language have arrived for Windows 10.
Swift is Apple's open-source, general-purpose programming language[1] that developers can use to develop programs for iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, Linux, and z/OS platforms.
The Apple-backed Swift project has now released downloadable Swift toolchain images for Windows[2], which contain everything needed to build and run Swift code on Windows 10.
The Windows 10 toolchain is available for Swift 5.3 and is provided by Saleem Abdulrasool, a member of the Swift Core Team and a software engineer at Google Brain.
Abdulrasool detailed the many challenges to bringing Swift to Windows in a talk at the LLVM dev meeting last year[3]. He noted at the time he managed to bring Swift to Windows through cross-compilation on Linux.
Besides porting the Swift compiler, the toolchain includes the standard library and Swift's three core libraries: Foundation, libdispatch, and 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," writes Abdulrasool.
"With these core libraries and the flexible interoperability of Swift with C, it is possible to develop applications on Windows purely in Swift while taking advantage of the existing corpus of libraries on the Windows platforms."
Abdulrasool said the current state Swift for Windows was "the beginning of a journey" that will soon include the Swift Package Manager, which still needs more work.
Developers who want to try Swift on Windows[4] will need the toolchain installer and Visual Studio 2019 integrated development environment, as well as other components like the Windows 10 SDK, and toolsets for building C++ code and the Windows Universal C Runtime.