Apple has open sourced Swift System and added support for Linux, according to Apple developer Michael Ilseman.
Since Apple introduced Swift, it has quickly become one of the most important programming languages in use, largely supplanting its predecessor, Objective-C. Swift is the native language for creating macOS, iOS and iPadOS apps. In June, Apple released “Swift System, a new library for Apple platforms that provides idiomatic interfaces to system calls and low-level currency types.”
Apple has now open sourced the library and made it available for Linux as well. Swift System helps address issues with imported C interfaces, providing a better way to handle system calls.
Ilseman highlights the advantages of System being a multi-platform library, as opposed to a cross-platform one:
“System is a multi-platform library, not a cross-platform one. It provides a separate set of APIs and behaviors on every supported platform, closely reflecting the underlying OS interfaces. A single import will pull in the native platform interfaces specific for the targeted OS.
“Our immediate goal is to simplify building cross-platform libraries and applications such as SwiftNIO and the Swift Package Manager. System does not eliminate the need for #if os() conditionals to implement cross-platform abstractions, but it does make it safer and more expressive to fill out the platform-specific parts.”
By the sounds of Ilseman’s post, it looks as though Apple has big plans for System.