The current state of Swift for Server and Linux

[Karl]

I mentioned this in another thread but it's probably worth repeating as part of this discussion:

@Karl

Technically, since a lot of Xcode's knowledge of Swift source comes from the compiler toolchain (highlighting, code completion, refactoring, etc), and the compiler is capable of cross-compiling, it should be possible to allow you to set the flags which tell Xcode's compiler-driven tools to use a different target platform (and some form of this surely already exists to support iOS/watchOS/tvOS development on a Mac).

It would enable a lot of workflows just like yours - library and server developers could download a pre-packaged Linux cross-compile toolchain and quickly test that their code builds on Linux, while editing and prototyping on their Macs in the familiar Xcode interface.

Obviously Xcode's roadmap is up to Apple's Xcode team and is not something this community can steer, but I think it would be worth the SSWG reaching out to them and asking what more Swift's premier IDE can do to better support Swift packages on Linux.

I'm sure many SSWG members themselves would love to be able to build code for Linux using Xcode on their Macs, if it was even a fraction as integrated as building code for iOS.

All we'd really need is a way to set the flags Xcode uses to talk to the toolchain's compiler/sourcekit-lsp/etc, so that we could set a custom target, sysroot, and resource-dir (for the standard library). If we could bundle those in a configuration file along with the packaged sysroot/custom toolchain, that should be enough to provide a pretty great experience when building Swift programs for other platforms.

So yeah - it's clear that support for editing on Linux needs to improve, but perhaps it's also true that support for cross-platform development on the Mac also could be improved?