gcc based Swift

Posted Sep 19, 2024 18:56 UTC (Thu) by atai (subscriber, #10977)
Parent article: Swift 6 released

how easy or doable would be a gcc based Swift?

gcc based Swift

Posted Sep 19, 2024 20:14 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (1 responses)

Are you familiar with the Java GCC frontend? It was removed in 2016, and the libraries never reached Java 1.2 support. I'm pretty sure a Swift frontend would meet the same fate. The only way to chase a fast changing standard like Java or Swift is serious funding or possibly a huge amount of volunteer support, and there wasn't really enough to clone Java or QT before upstreams released those under free licenses. GCJ at least had the argument of compiling Java to native machine code; what's the motive for a GCC based Swift frontend?

gcc based Swift

Posted Sep 20, 2024 0:37 UTC (Fri) by tachoknight (guest, #173552) [Link]

Swift is an LLVM-based language, like Clang, with the caveat that it's not part of the LLVM project, but the Swift project, so LLVM is forked and included as part of the whole toolchain (including its own clang, lldb, etc.). So the original post has the right idea, but until the tables are turned and Swift is actually part of the LLVM project, which may or may not ever happen, it'll always be its own special thing.

Also, as mentioned, that's the language but does not take into account frameworks, certainly no GUI-based frameworks, which would be out of scope for LLVM.