Apple's Swift language project gains continuous integration

Apple on Monday officially launched continuous integration for Swift, enabling checks on the project's health, and integrated testing within pull requests before any commits are made.

Apple's system is based on Jenkins, and builds and runs tests for OS X and the iOS simulator, as well as Ubuntu Linux, according to the official Swift blog. It's designed to allow more configurations over time, "especially in the cases where ports to other platforms or architectures reach a critical mass and support from the Swift development community," the Swift team said.

If a developer makes a change that breaks a build, they'll automatically receive an email notification. The project should soon start supporting performance tests as well.

Swift is a relatively young programming language, as even Apple itself is believed to be making little use of it outside of a few mobile apps and small sections of OS X El Capitan.

There's still no 32-bit Swift runtime for OS X, and the Swift ABI (application binary interface) is unfinished. The latter, at least, may arrive alongside Swift 3, but Apple is unlikely to reveal any detailed plans until June's Worldwide Developers Conference.

15 Comments

slprescott 759 comments · 10 Years

About 8 years ago

Is this CI for the users of Swift -- i.e., developers who are writing programs using XCode -- or is this CI for the people who are modifying the Swift language itself (Apple employees + participants from the Open Source community)? I think it's #2... which is good but applicable to a fairly small audience.

Blaster 97 comments · 9 Years

slprescott said:

Is this CI for the users of Swift -- i.e., developers who are writing programs using XCode -- or is this CI for the people who are modifying the Swift language itself (Apple employees + participants from the Open Source community)? I think it's #2... which is good but applicable to a fairly small audience.

It's for the language itself. But I am curious why Apple isn't using the Xcode Server feature in OS X Server. Does Apple even use OS X Server themselves?

cyberzombie 257 comments · 13 Years

I think it's the latter. Only 21 pull requests, 336 commits by 58 contributors. Even so, it's a very good thing. While I have no plans to contribute (full time Java enterprise dev and doing my first Swift app on the side), I've got the repository up and visited daily...

freerange 1597 comments · 16 Years

Non-programmer asks, "does making Swift open source create / increase future security risks / problems"?

ksec 1502 comments · 18 Years

I believe Swift 3.0 will be big this year in WWDC, and will be big in OSX 10.12 as well as iOS 10.