Relationship between swift-build, xcodebuild, and Xcode

[ethanc8 (Ethan C)]

@jakepetroules

So to answer your question: yes, you could use swbuild to build an Xcode project, but you'd first need to convert it to PIF using xcodebuild. There are some examples in the Swift Build codebase of how to invoke xcodebuild to do so. But I'd like to stress that this is not an intended use case outside of debugging, and end users should be using swift-build (from SwiftPM) or xcodebuild to perform command line builds of their projects.

By this, do you mean that swift-build (of SwiftPM) would build SwiftPM projects and that xcodebuild would build Xcode projects? Or can swift-build also build Xcode projects?

@jakepetroules

Instead, Swift Build uses an internal project representation called "PIF".

Do the higher-level clients store the PIF representation on disk, or is it stored only in memory?