What are best practices to write a Linux Software on macOS

[dnadoba (David Nadoba)]

@mpilman

It seems in the near future Swift might be as convenient as C++ in that regard (as long as you only use the standard library and no OS specific stuff you'll probably be fine)

This is already the case today for the Swift Standard Library. Note that Foundation and Dispatch are not considered part of the Swift Standard library and instead separate frameworks.

@mpilman

I obviously could wait for CI to tell me, but it doesn't seem to be super convenient. I would really like to be in a place where if my stuff compiles and works on macOS there's a very high chance it will also compile and work on Linux.

If you use platform specific features you can just use docker to build and run swift on linux locally on your mac. After you have downloaded and installed docker you can just run the following command:

docker run \
    --rm -it \
    --volume "$(pwd)/:/src" \
    --workdir "/src/" \
    swift:5.7-focal 

and afterwards swift build or swift run name-of-exectuable to build or run your code on ubuntu linux.

Cross Compilation from macOS to Linux will be possible with this pitch: Pitch: Cross-Compilation Destination Bundles. You will then no longer need docker to build your code for linux. If you want to run it you will still need a Linux VM after all.

More server specific guides are available on Swift.org - Swift on Server Guides