Evolving SwiftPM Builds with Swift Build

[jakepetroules]

@Karl

One thing that I'm quite interested in is cross-compilation and remote debugging support - I think that is something that Xcode does extremely well for iOS devices, and you really wish for that kind of experience when targeting other platforms, too (such as Linux or embedded devices). Is that included in the goal to provide a great experience targeting all supported platforms?

Cross-compilation is something we've already begun to make some progress towards, as there is some initial support for targeting Android and QNX in the repo. WebAssembly also comes to mind. All of this also ties in with Swift SDKs support as well, which is something we're tracking: Swift SDKs Cross Compilation Support · Issue #6 · swiftlang/swift-build · GitHub

EDIT: To add some additional clarification, Swift Build is generally much more natively architected on the idea that all targets are cross-compilation targets, so we're already in a pretty good place here.

Debugging wise, I think there are definitely some interesting opportunities there. For example, perhaps swift-run could learn how to delegate to adb to allow seamlessly running a built command line tool on a connected Android device, or on similar devices running Linux or other embedded platforms.