Swift 5.3 will support for Windows and additional Linux distributions

The Swift development team said that it’s upcoming Swift 5.3 release goals include increasing support for Windows and other Linux distributions.

They mentioned that Swift 5.3 will include significant quality and performance enhancements. What’s more, this release will also expand the number of platforms available and supported by Swift, especially adding support for Windows and other Linux distributions.

Apple open-sourced the Swift programming language, but there seems to be no incentive to expand support for other platforms except its own platform, so Swift’s cross-platform progress has been slow, and currently only supports macOS and Ubuntu.

Because of this, many community members are very active in porting Swift to more platforms. For example, IBM contributed the Kitura framework for Swift on the server-side, but due to disappointing usage, IBM dropped most of its support in December 2019. In addition, there is a well-known, Vapor framework, a web development framework that runs on macOS and Ubuntu.

For the Windows platform, the SwiftForWindows project is an open-source that supports an easy-to-use development environment in Windows, but now it seems dead. In addition, you can use the Linux subsystem (WSL) of Windows to run the Swift compiler, but there is a problem: the interactive command-line REPL (Read Eval Print Loop) does not work in WSL 1.0. So, for developers who want to use Swift on Windows, running the Swift toolchain in a Docker container is an effective solution.