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Does that mean you'll soon need to have Swift to compile the Swift compiler? How many versions back do they want to support for bootstrapping?
by est31 7y ago
Does that mean you'll soon need to have Swift to compile the Swift compiler? How many versions back do they want to support for bootstrapping?
- favorited 7y agoI don't think there's a formal plan for bootstrapping yet. This is just the driver, so it shouldn't be too hard to write a tool which builds it by manually invoking the compiler frontend.
- dorfsmay 7y agoI suspect they'll sell a binary if all you want to do is develop apps in swift, and that they have a bootstrapping system to compile the compiler, like every other native compiler. I believe that Chris Lattner the original author of LLVM also started Swift and is (or was) working at Apple on compilers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lattner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lattner
- favorited 7y agoWhy would anyone sell a binary? It's all open source. And Chris Lattner has worked at Google for a while now.
- ken 7y agoOr cross-compile it. Swift already supports Linux, and there are even official Docker images. I don't see anything wrong with having a bootstrap process that begins with cross-compilation. After all, that's probably how your platform got its first C compiler, too.