• Home
  • Apps
  • News
  • Apple Makes Swift Build Open Source, Renames Swift Playgrounds

Apple Makes Swift Build Open Source, Renames Swift Playgrounds

Apple Makes Swift Build Open Source, Renames Swift Playgrounds

Apple announced on Saturday that it is making Swift Build open source. The build engine is used by Xcode, as well as for the Cupertino firm’s internal projects.

Apple made the announcement on Saturday.

As Swift expands, there’s value in investing in matching cross-platform build tools that provide a powerful, consistent, and flexible experience across the ecosystem.

As a foundational step in this new chapter of Swift build technologies, today Apple is open sourcing Swift Build, a powerful and extensible build engine that provides a set of build rules for building Swift projects. Swift Build is the engine used by Xcode, which supports millions of apps in the App Store as well as the internal build process for Apple’s own operating systems.

Swift Build is now available on GitHub.

As first noted by John Gruber, Apple has also updated its Swift Playground app, and in the process changed it from plural to singular.

Interesting detail with the latest update to Apple’s app for learning and tinkering with Swift: it’s now named Playground, singular, not Playgrounds, plural. I’m not going to argue that much should be made of the name change, but I like it. The app is the playground — a place for playing with Swift — not a factory for making playgrounds.