Hacker News Reader

Comment by jabofh | Hacker News Reader

To abuse an old meme: "...yes, but does it run on Linux..."

It seems like Windows already has a glut of similar tools; if you wanted to make a real impact with a fairly new language, which Swift is, with massive corporate backing, which Swift has, the one would think Linux would be a far more opportune destination for an effort like this.

View on HN

It already works on Linux (quite well, actually): https://swift.org/download/#releases

Swift had Linux support almost right on the beginning. I think that even Apple are supporting this effort.

Windows on the other side were started as a community effort of only one brave fellow. That later was even hired by Apple as far as i know.

I guess this is why this is much splashy than the Linux support. It was more of a community thing and less of a corporate thing as the Linux support was.

It has been running on Linux since the first day it was made available as an open source project. It specifically targeted the current and current-1 versions of Ubuntu, but now it also targets Fedora Core and a few other distros contain official packages for it.

Yes, it had official Linux support since 2015.

There are already multiple Linux toolchains available, Windows is just catching up: https://swift.org/download/

It has run on windows for years. It's fairly limited in terms of distro support, but this is a stated goal for Swift 6.

Presumably "windows" was a typo, and you meant Linux instead, but to be clear, official support for Swift on native (ie. not WSL) Windows is new in this release, and is largely the work of Saleem Abdulrasool who wrote the linked blog post.

Yes I did mean linux, thanks for the correction

Reply on news.ycombinator.com