Pitch - Swift Tooling Workgroup

[rvsrvs]

Is that going to be based on the target triple in the destination? Have to admit I haven't built that package in a while.

[BrentM (Brent Mifsud)]

This is definitely needed.

Tooling is the one area where swift falls short. And it hinders adoption outside of apples ecosystem.

[stevapple (YR Chen)]

@stevapple

I think it makes sense to have a standalone cross-compilation workgroup to investigate the layout and distribution of toolchain and SDK, to improve the overall cross-compilation functionality of the toolchain and to write up cross-compilation terms and guides. Cross-compilation becomes more and more important a thing with our efforts on embedded programming and bootstrapping, and it also ties to the goal of making Swift available on more platforms, no matter as a host or as a target.

I suggest we continue in another thread on the cross-compilation topic, since @0xTim‘s initiative includes far more than that.

This part is largely covered by the Swift Platform Work Group initiative. Feel free to discuss about cross-compilation experience there.

[Jeehut (Cihat Gündüz)]

+1 on Swift scripting. There's lots of developers interested in using Swift for scripting as well, there's nothing selfish about it. Unfortunately the scripting support in Swift is practically not given (there's no file import or script-dependency definition, for example), but related pitches do exist.

I think it would make a lot of sense for Swift Scripting to be part of a Swift Tooling workgroup as scripting mostly benefits from great tooling and scripts can be seen as tools themselves, given that they are typically run from the command line.

[tomerd]

Thanks for bringing this idea up @0xTim, and for everyone providing feedback on this thread.

Over the last few months, the Core Team has been reorganizing the project by creating a number of dedicated workgroups to oversee different areas of the project. That work isn’t done, and the Core Team still sees a lot of areas that would immediately benefit from having this kind of focused leadership, including platform support and portability, productivity tools, toolchain distribution, tools for building and distributing Swift programs, and source editing.

The package ecosystem is another growth area, with new tools and services coming online that would benefit from clear guidance towards building a safe and secured ecosystem.

Over the last few weeks, the core team has been discussing how to best address the needs expressed in this thread in light of these motivations. The exact details are yet to be determined, but it is likely to include the formation of a new workgroup with the charter to lead in across the platform support, productivity tools, and packages ecosystem concerns. As the Core Team continues to work out the organizational structure details, we encourage the community to continue and discuss these ideas. We also invite community members who would like to be part of such initiative to reach out directly to the core team to express such interest.