Apple’s Swift language gets version manager

Apple has introduced swiftly 1.0, a version manager for the Swift programming language that is intended to ease the process of installing, managing, and updating the user’s Swift tool chain.

Swiftly 1.0 was announced March 28. While swiftly has been available for some years as a community-supported tool for Swift developers using Linux, the swiftly 1.0 release makes it an officially supported part of the core Swift tool chain. The project is now hosted in the Swift GitHub organization. Apple has added macOS support to swiftly make it easier to install Swift separately from the Xcode development environment.  

The swiftly tool can install the standalone Swift toolchain, providing commands to install Swift on a new system, update to the latest stable version, and experiment with nightly snapshots or older versions. Written in Swift, swiftly also makes it easy to switch between multiple installed tool chains. By adding a file to a project repository, developers can configure swiftly to use the same Swift tool chain version for all members of the development team.

Documentation on swiftly is at swift.org. To retrieve the latest Swift release, swiftly uses the Swift OpenAPI plugin to generate code to interact with the swift.org website. Plans call for having swiftly become the default way to install Swift outside of Xcode. The initial version supports macOS and Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora.