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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

> The Swift compiler and runtimes have a few dependencies. Please install the following dependencies:

> (…) python3 (…)

Wait, which part requires Python, and why? And is that only for FreeBSD, or in general? And is that something which will change? Feels very weird that a compiled systems language is dependent on a high-level scripting language.

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The Swift toolchain includes LLDB, which relies on python for some debugging features. The compiler and runtime itself do not use python.

It's likely that Swift compiler is using LLVM LIT (https://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/lit.html), which is implemented in python, as the test driver

Python and LIT are used heavily to build and test the compiler, but that is only for building it, you do not need it to download and use the built toolchain. The python dependency is more about its use in LLDB.

it's not weird at all - you need something sensible to run complicated things while bootstrapping the compiler. Rust does the same thing: https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/building/how-to-build-...

LLDB also needs python if you want to use its scripting integration.

https://github.com/orgs/swiftlang/repositories?q=lang%3Apyth... From a quick look, appears to be the test suite. Which makes sense, hard to validate your language with itself.

That greatly depends on the codebase and the language.

https://github.com/SWI-Prolog/swipl-devel/blob/master/tests/...

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