Ubuntu 20.04 and other GNU/Linux distros are now compatible with Apple Swift

Apple, through the official blog of Swift, announced support for two new GNU/Linux distributions in addition to the recent support for Windows.

Swift is an object-oriented programming language for Apple (macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS) and Linux systems, presented by the company during WWDC 2014. This language is designed to coexist with the Objective-C language, typical of developments for Apple operating systems, simplifying the writing of the code. On March 25, 2019, version 5.0 was released under the Apache 2.0 open source license for Apple and Linux systems.

Until now, support for Linux was limited to Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus and Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver. Swift could be used on other distributions but without the official support offered by the Cupertino house. Swift 5.3 will also officially work on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa, CentOS 8, and Amazon Linux 2, the Amazon distribution for Amazon Web Services (AWS). So clear the look at the Linux-server world which is now sufficiently covered.

Who's next? Debian, Fedora and CentOS 7

The team working on the Swift project explains that more Linux distributions will be added in the coming months, the candidates are CentOS 7, widely used at company level, Fedora and Debian.

As trivial as the arrival of support for new distros may seem, this is not the case. Certainly, that for Focal Fossa has required few modifications. Instead, CentOS and Amazon Linux are not derived from Debian but are based on Red Hat projects. This is why the developers had to make several changes to the Swift project to ensure this compatibility.

The most recent version of Swift at the moment is 5.2.3 released on April 29th. However, Swift 5.3 snapshots, Swift's next release, were released earlier this month for Xcode, Ubuntu 18.04, and Ubuntu 16.04.