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Comment by tempodox | Hacker News Reader

> However, it would be a significant bump in requirements for using the compiler on macOS: currently, the compiler can run on macOS 10.9 or newer. This would move that requirement to macOS 10.15.

Is this even relevant? For using a newer Swift with Xcode I'm forced to upgrade the OS anyway. Xcode absolutely refuses to be installed on previous OSes. Can you sensibly develop in Swift with anything else besides Xcode?

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Yes, the swift toolchain includes a full set of command line apps. If you install swift on another platform like Linux for example, you won't have Xcode. You'll have the typical set of command line utilities you'd expect from compilers like gcc and llvm. You don't need Xcode, even for macOS and iOS dev.

Source: I do most of my swift development, including iOS and macOS dev, in a terminal. Editing with vim and using the swift command for the rest. You can even launch your iOS emulators and such from your command line while you're developing.

> Can you sensibly develop in Swift with anything else besides Xcode?

JetBrains makes a fully-featured IDE for Objective-C and Swift. https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/

It's a fine IDE, just like all their IDEs. But last time I used it for some Swift/SwiftUI, it still required to have Xcode installed.

Do you mean Swift? Or perhaps you mean iOS development since you mention SwiftUI?

SwiftUI works on macOS, too. [0]

[0] https://developer.apple.com/tutorials/swiftui/creating-a-mac...

SwiftUI, the frameworks, is not part of Swift, the language. You can happily use Swift without SwiftUI, or an Apple OS/hardware.

We use AppCode (JetBrains) with server-side Swift and had to install XCode to get it to work.

I can't recall why it's necessary, but the first step in our developer onboarding README is "Install XCode, even though we don't use it"

FWIW our team has found JetBrains pretty fantastic for Swift. An important caveat of that being that we make a database product that runs on linux -- not a MacOS / iOS app that would benefit from all the special features of XCode. My guess is if that's your jam, XCode is the only high-productivity game in town.

It's probably the build-chain that comes with Xcode that requires the installation. You can probably do it yourself, but it'll be a bigger hassle.

It's more a question of things like if you're building the Swift compiler in your CI system with macOS nodes less than 10.15, then you'll have to upgrade them. That can be problems if the build nodes you're building on are on hardware that doesn't support macOS 10.15. Now you have to buy a whole new Mac Mini or whatever just to continue building.

What about virtualization? https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM

    Can you sensibly develop in Swift with anything else besides Xcode?

Kinda, you can install Swift Playgrounds on an iPad or Mac and develop apps with it. Not as powerful as Xcode, but you can use it.

> Can you sensibly develop in Swift with anything else besides Xcode

kinda. I bring a throwaway laptop most everywhere which is enough to build swift packages and test using LSP-based IDE.

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