how a swift project is built
Asked on 2025-10-28
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Building a Swift project involves several steps and tools, primarily using Xcode and the Swift Package Manager (SwiftPM). Here are some key points from the WWDC sessions:
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Xcode Build System: Xcode uses a build system that can handle Swift, Objective-C, and C code. The build process involves compiling modules, which are collections of source files built together. Xcode has introduced improvements to build efficiency, such as explicitly built modules, which allow for more parallelism and faster debugging (Demystify explicitly built modules).
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Swift Build: Swift Build is an open-source build engine used by Xcode and Swift Playground. It supports the build process for Apple's operating systems and is being integrated into the Swift Package Manager to unify the build experience across Swift toolchains (What’s new in Xcode).
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Swift Package Manager (SwiftPM): SwiftPM is a tool for managing Swift packages, which are collections of modules. It can be used to build, test, and run Swift code. SwiftPM supports prebuilt Swift syntax dependencies to speed up clean build times, especially in continuous integration environments (What’s new in Swift).
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Cross Compilation: Swift supports cross-compilation, allowing you to build a Swift package on one platform (e.g., macOS) and deploy it on another (e.g., Linux) using the static Linux SDK (What’s new in Swift).
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Modules and Packages: In Swift, a module is a collection of source files built together, and a package is a collection of modules. SwiftPM is used to manage these packages, and you can work on them using Xcode or other editors that support the language server protocol (A Swift Tour: Explore Swift’s features and design).
These improvements and tools aim to enhance the build process's efficiency, reliability, and speed, making it easier for developers to manage and build Swift projects.
What’s new in Swift
Join us for an update on Swift. We’ll briefly go through a history of Swift over the past decade, and show you how the community has grown through workgroups, expanded the package ecosystem, and increased platform support. We’ll introduce you to a new language mode that achieves data-race safety by default, and a language subset that lets you run Swift on highly constrained systems. We’ll also explore some language updates including noncopyable types, typed throws, and improved C++ interoperability.
What’s new in Swift
Join us for an update on Swift. We’ll talk about workflow improvements that make you more productive, and new and modernized library APIs for fundamental programming tasks. We’ll show examples of Swift adoption throughout more layers of the software stack. Finally, we’ll explore new language features for both improving approachability of concurrency, and achieving peak performance when you need it.
What’s new in Xcode
Discover the latest productivity and performance advancements in Xcode 26. Learn how to leverage large language models in your development workflow. Explore editing and debugging enhancements, improved performance and testing tools, and Swift Build - the open-source build system engine used by Xcode.