Developers can now build and run Swift code on Windows

Apple's Swift programming language officially landed on Windows this week, with Swift toolchain images now available for download from the open source project.

Announced in a blog post on Tuesday, the release of Swift tools enables developers to build, run and debug code directly on Windows 10.

The toolchain includes the compiler, standard library, and core libraries, all key ingredients for creating functional apps.

"With these core libraries and the flexible interoperability of Swift with C, it is possible to develop applications on Windows purely in Swift while taking advantage of the existing corpus of libraries on the Windows platforms," writes Saleem Abdulrasool, Swift Core Team member and software engineer at Google Brain.

A basic calculator app was created with Swift and Visual Studio 2019 to demonstrate the toolkit's capabilities. The app was built with CMake, but Abdulrasool notes Swift Package Manager support on Windows is in the works.

Some major developers are already experimenting with Swift on Windows. Readdle, a longtime developer of iOS and Mac software, has been tinkering with a cross-platform version of its Spark email platform since 2019 and is seeing good results.

Developers interested in contributing to the project are welcomed to download the toolchain and report issues to the Swift Bug Tracker.