Evolving SwiftPM Builds with Swift Build

[hassila (Joakim Hassila)]

Also very happy to see this happen, thanks for open sourcing it!

Just would like to reply to this one shortly (and can follow up in the other thread on RLP linked to below as it may be more suitable).

@jakepetroules

I’d encourage reading up on [PITCH] Support for binary dependencies - #74 by jakepetroules if you haven’t already, which contains a lot of great background information and some of the difficulties on Linux in particular due to it having such a vast number of possible ABIs and no clear and canonical way to identify them.

Quoting from that link:

I would like to see a compelling argument for why we absolutely need binary packages on Linux when we have the system package manager to handle the vast majority (if not close to 100%) of those use cases, including for closed-source proprietary packages (of which there are few to begin with).

I just want to clearly state that there is a clear and important use case for those of us who wants to support customers building plugins vs. a resilient API in a controlled enterprise environment (where we as an ISV vend an API that our customers makes use of, but with strict constraints and control on runtime platform and toolchains used/supported). Happy to elaborate as needed, but it is a proven need with a few decades of background experience in various shapes and forms.

Some background here:

Optional xcframework support for Linux

Dynamic library support on Linux with library evolution

and a resulting warm and fresh pitch for a limited solution that supports this use case (instead of dismissing Linux as too complex and impossible to solve).

[Pitch] Replaceable Library Plugins

hi Swift Evolvers! this is the Swift Evolution Pitch for the feature previously discussed in Can You (Dynamically) Link Swift Libraries on Linux? if you want to test-drive this feature at home, clone the implementation PR of SwiftPM and build the modified package manager, and try it out with the end-to-end example projects here: Example Producer: swift-rlp-example Example Consumer: swift-rlp-example-client or, alternatively, you can try your hand at creating your own Replaceable Libraries! …