[swift-dev] Bootstrapping Swift compiler

[David Owens II]

LLVM is usable from C APIs and can be used from within Swift. There might be a few rough edges, but it’s doable. That said, it’s a lot of work to re-write the compiler simply to bootstrap itself, and frankly, while the syntax of the language is still in high flux, it would be a bit of a foolish task with very little gain.

I could see it potentially happening later (or a small team to start on it after v3), but there is so much missing from Swift right now that I don’t see the team spending any significant amount of time to do work that won’t bring any developer-facing features to the table.

-David

> On Dec 3, 2015, at 10:30 PM, David Owens II <owensd at fastmail.com> wrote:
> 
> LLVM is usable from C APIs and can be used from within Swift. There might be a few rough edges, but it’s doable. That said, it’s a lot of work to re-write the compiler simply to bootstrap itself, and frankly, while the syntax of the language is still in high flux, it would be a bit of a foolish task with very little gain.
> 
> I could see it potentially happening later (or a small team to start on it after v3), but there is so much missing from Swift right now that I don’t see the team spending any significant amount of time to do work that won’t bring any developer-facing features to the table.
> 
> -David
> 
>> On Dec 3, 2015, at 9:35 PM, AlexDenisov <1101.debian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Swift is heavily depends on LLVM, which is written in C++.
>> Seems it’s not going happen in the near future since there are no plans for C++ <> Swift interoperability (yet?).
>> --
>> AlexDenisov
>> Software Engineer, http://lowlevelbits.org
>> 
>>> On 04 Dec 2015, at 03:39, 出水 厚輝 <demmys.atsuki at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Is there any schedules or ideas concerning a bootstrapping Swift?
>>> I think all Swift users have an ability to be a good committer, except for his/her skills in C++.
>>> And also I think Swift can be the swiftest and most readable language in the future.
>>> So isn't it natural to the Swift compiler to be self-hosted?
>>> 
>>> Thank you for your time.
>>> 
>>> - Atsuki_______________________________________________
>>> swift-dev mailing list
>>> swift-dev at swift.org
>>> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-dev
>> 
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