Hello Swift community,
The review of SE-0490: Environment Constrained Shared Libraries ran from September 5th through September 18th, 2025. The proposal is returned for revision, and should be further discussed as a pitch to coalesce further before coming up for review again.
During the review discussion, a number of issues surfaced with the proposal, including:
- A very helpful set of constructive criticism from @owenv, covering a number of topics including the lack of features to help end users to use the feature correctly and a couple of issues where the proposal deviated from existing practice, for instance on the layout of
swiftmodules in theartifactbundle. - Concerns about whether the proposal fits with the long-term direction that the build system team want to take for this feature.
- The lack of an implementation for the new build system, Swift Build. While to an extent this is an unfortunate accident of timing, it does combine with the above to make it hard to approve the proposal in its current form without further discussion.
The Platform Steering Group felt as a result that it was best to return the proposal for revision, while at the same time continuing to encourage the proposal authors to talk to the Swift Platform Manager and Swift Build maintainers to find some way forward. It's clear that all parties have an interest in finding a good solution to the problem this proposal attempts to address, and we hope to see a revised version of the proposal at some future point that we feel we will be able to accept.
Thank-you,
Alastair.