[swift-dev] Requiring Xcode 7.3 to build Swift master for Apple platforms?

[Grant Paul]

The latest available version of the Darwin linker (ld64) on opensource.apple.com is the version from Xcode 7.0. It would be great if Swift master didn’t depend on new linker functionality until a newer version of the linker source is available with the fix, so Swift could be compiled with from-source toolchains.

Grant

> Xcode 7.3 included a fix for the Apple linker that's necessary to support some of the metadata format changes we're making in Swift 3. I have some workarounds in place that I'd like to remove since they suppress linker coalescing of some constant strings. Would anyone object to us requiring using Xcode 7.3 to develop Swift for OS X and other Apple platforms? If not, we could conditionalize the workarounds behind a flag, though that's additional complexity and testing surface I'd like to avoid.
> 
> -Joe