Swift

Swift is a modern, fast, and type-safe programming language developed by Apple. While widely known for iOS and macOS app development, Swift is open-source and officially supports server-side and command-line application development on Linux.

Installation

You can install Swift on Ubuntu using swiftly (the official Swift toolchain manager) or via system package repositories.

Option 1: Using System Packages (APT)

On supported Ubuntu distributions, Swift is available directly via APT:

apt update
apt install -y swiftlang

Warning: Avoid running apt install swift directly, as that package installs OpenStack Swift (an object storage service), not the Swift programming language compiler. Use swiftlang.

Option 2: Using Swiftly (Official Toolchain Manager)

swiftly is the recommended toolchain manager for installing and managing multiple Swift versions on Linux.

1. Install required system build dependencies:

apt update
apt install -y binutils git gnupg2 libc6-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libedit2 libgcc-13-dev libpython3-dev libsqlite3-0 libstdc++-13-dev libxml2-dev libz3-dev pkg-config tzdata unzip zlib1g-dev curl

2. Download and initialize swiftly:

curl -O https://download.swift.org/swiftly/linux/swiftly-1.0.1-$(uname -m).tar.gz
tar -zxf swiftly-1.0.1-$(uname -m).tar.gz
./swiftly init
source ~/.local/share/swiftly/env.sh

3. Install the latest stable Swift compiler release:

swiftly install latest

Verification

Verify that the Swift compiler and toolchain are available:

swift --version

Writing and Running Code

Interpreting Code Directly

Create a Swift source file named hello.swift:

import Foundation

print("Hello, World from Swift in TIDE!")

Run the script directly through the Swift interpreter:

swift hello.swift

Compiling to Native Executable

Compile the source file into an optimized binary using swiftc:

swiftc hello.swift -o hello
./hello

Using Swift Package Manager (SPM)

Initialize, build, and run a structured Swift application:

mkdir HelloApp && cd HelloApp
swift package init --type executable
swift run

Official Resources

• Official Website