From what I understand the only thing you need to do to run Swift on Linux is to download the toolchain and install clang, but I see that the version of clang from the system I'm running on is :
Ubuntu clang version 3.4-1ubuntu3 (tags/RELEASE_34/final) (based on LLVM 3.4)
Is that sufficient? I am able to use the REPL, but is there the risk that other features might not work ?
I was also surprised to see that swift --version
is
Swift version 4.1.3 (swift-4.1.3-RELEASE)
Target: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
Should I be worried about Swift not correctly detecting the OS?
This is not a system I administrate, therefore I cannot manually update clang/llvm if that's needed, is there a way to install it to a different directory and specify it to Swift?
Theoretically that risk exists, but I ignored that warning for over a year without noticing any side effects. If getting a newer version of clang is too difficult, don’t fight with it too much until/if something you want to do actually doesn’t work. The message about it is a disclaimer‐like warning, not a failure.
That is exactly what you should see on Ubuntu. Swift doesn’t need to know the system any more specifically than that.
Thank you! It's great to know that old versions of LLVM work with Swift in general, I hope that I'll find a confirmation that it's always possible to specify an alternate LLVM path tough (more specifically that the custom path is correctly taken into account by the compiler).
I need to use Swift for a project where I prefer not to take the risk to be blocked, as time is limited and the project should compile on machines with the configuration I described.