Welcome to Swift!
Swift is a high-performance system programming language. It has a clean and modern syntax, offers seamless access to existing C and Objective-C code and frameworks, and is memory safe (by default).
Although inspired by Objective-C and many other languages, Swift is not itself a C-derived language. As a complete and independent language, Swift packages core features like flow control, data structures, and functions, with high-level constructs like objects, protocols, closures, and generics. Swift embraces modules, eliminating the need for headers and the code duplication they entail.
To read the documentation, start by installing the Sphinx documentation
generator tool (http://sphinx-doc.org, just run easy_install -U Sphinx from
the command line and you're good to go). Once you have that, you can build the
Swift documentation by going into docs and typing make. This compiles
the .rst files in the docs directory into HTML in the docs/_build/html
directory.
Once built, the best place to start is with the Swift white paper, which gives a
tour of the language (in docs/_build/html/whitepaper/index.html).
Another potentially useful document is docs/LangRef, which gives a low level
tour of how the language works from the implementation perspective.
Many of the docs are out of date, but you can see some historical design
documents in the docs directory.
Another source of documentation is the standard library itself, located in
stdlib. Much of the language is actually implemented in the library
(including Int), and the standard library gives some examples of what can be
expressed today.
These instructions give the most direct path to a working Swift development environment. Options for doing things differently are discussed below.
OS X, Ubuntu Linux LTS, and the latest Ubuntu Linux release are the current supported host development operating systems.
For OS X, you need the latest Xcode.
For Ubuntu, you'll need the following development dependencies:
sudo apt-get install git cmake ninja-build clang uuid-dev libicu-dev icu-devtools libbsd-dev libedit-dev libxml2-dev libsqlite3-dev swig libpython-dev libncurses5-dev pkg-config
Note: LLDB currently requires at least swig-1.3.40 but will successfully build with version 2 shipped with Ubuntu.
If you are building on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, you'll need to upgrade your clang compiler for C++14 support and create a symlink:
sudo apt-get install clang-3.6
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/clang clang /usr/bin/clang-3.6 100
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/clang++ clang++ /usr/bin/clang++-3.6 100
For those checking out sources as read-only:
git clone https://github.com/apple/swift.git swift
git clone https://github.com/apple/swift-llvm.git llvm
git clone https://github.com/apple/swift-clang.git clang
git clone https://github.com/apple/swift-lldb.git lldb
git clone https://github.com/apple/swift-cmark.git cmark
git clone https://github.com/apple/swift-llbuild.git llbuild
git clone https://github.com/apple/swift-package-manager.git swiftpm
git clone https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-xctest.git
git clone https://github.com/apple/swift-corelibs-foundation.git
For those who plan on regular making direct commits, cloning over SSH may provide a better experience (which requires uploading SSH keys to GitHub):
git clone git@github.com:apple/swift.git swift
git clone git@github.com:apple/swift-llvm.git llvm
git clone git@github.com:apple/swift-clang.git clang
git clone git@github.com:apple/swift-lldb.git lldb
git clone git@github.com:apple/swift-cmark.git cmark
git clone git@github.com:apple/swift-llbuild.git llbuild
git clone git@github.com:apple/swift-package-manager.git swiftpm
git clone git@github.com:apple/swift-corelibs-xctest.git
git clone git@github.com:apple/swift-corelibs-foundation.git
CMake is the core infrastructure used to configure builds of
Swift and its companion projects; at least version 2.8.12.2 is required. Your
favorite Linux distribution likely already has a CMake package you can install.
On OS X, you can download the CMake Binary Distribution,
bundled as an application, copy it to /Applications, and add the embedded
command line tools to your PATH:
export PATH=/Applications/CMake.app/Contents/bin:$PATH
Ninja is the current recommended build system for building Swift and is the default configuration generated by CMake. If you're on OS X or don't install it as part of your Linux distribution, clone it next to the other projects and it will be bootstrapped automatically:
git clone git@github.com:martine/ninja.git
You can also install CMake and Ninja on OS X using a third-party packaging tool like Homebrew…
brew install cmake ninja
…or MacPorts.
sudo port install cmake ninja
The build-script is a high-level build automation script that supports basic
options such as building a Swift-compatible LLDB, building the Swift Package
Manager, building for iOS, running tests after builds, and more. It also
supports presets which you can define for common combinations of build options.
To find out more:
utils/build-script -h
Note: Arguments after "--" above are forwarded to build-script-impl, which is
the ultimate shell script that invokes the actual build and test commands.
A basic command to build Swift and run basic tests with Ninja:
utils/build-script -t
The Xcode IDE can be used to edit the Swift source code, but it is not currently
fully supported as a build environment for SDKs other than OS X. If you'd like
to build for other SDKs but still use Xcode, once you've built Swift using Ninja
or one of the other supported CMake generators, you can set up an IDE-only Xcode
environment using the build-script's -X flag:
utils/build-script -X --skip-build -- --reconfigure
The --skip-build flag tells build-script to only generate the project,
not build it in its entirety. A bare minimum of LLVM tools will build in order
to configure the Xcode projects.
The --reconfigure flag tells build-script-impl to run the CMake configuration
step even if there is a cached configuration. As you develop in Xcode, you may
need to rerun this from time to time to refresh your generated Xcode project,
picking up new targets, file removals, or file additions.
See docs/Testing.rst.
Contributions to Swift are welcomed and encouraged! Please see the Contributing to Swift guide.
To be a truly great community, Swift.org needs to welcome developers from all walks of life, with different backgrounds, and with a wide range of experience. A diverse and friendly community will have more great ideas, more unique perspectives, and produce more great code. We will work diligently to make the Swift community welcoming to everyone.
To give clarity of what is expected of our members, Swift has adopted the code of conduct defined by the Contributor Covenant. This document is used across many open source communities, and we think it articulates our values well. For more, see the website.