Meet Plain Swift

[sspringer (Stefan Springer)]

The established project forms not specific to Apple‘s platforms are SPM and cmake, an IDE that wants to be more than a tool for just trying out the programming language should respect that and at least allow the use of SPM projects, considering the free Visual Studio Code extension for Swift from the Swift Server Workgroup can handle this quite well. You will have a hard time with a commercial product that offers less in this respect.

@dima_kozhinov

Swift Package Manager relies heavily on online git repositories.

Well, things are changing, and you can always reference SPM packages by system paths.

@dima_kozhinov

Using Swift Compiler (swiftc.exe) as opposed to Package Manager allows more fine grained tuning for the resulting executable, e.g. linking resource files (app icon, version info, and other resources), or creating a Windows GUI app (and not a console app), etc. Maybe SPM allows all that, but for me it's hard to figure out how.

Swift/WinRT (also see the samples) uses both SPM and cmake (cf. the articles by The Browser Company, just choose “No thanks” when first opening this website).

@wadetregaskis

I wonder if there'd be any interest or collaboration to be had with the Arc folks

The Arc folks (The Browser Company) use Visual Studio Code, and e.g. for debugging the view tree of a GUI they use Visual Studio (which is needed for Swift on Windows anyway).