(Cross-)Compiling Swift for Raspberry PI

Question

Swift is now Open Source. Did anyone tried compiling Swift for a Raspberry PI? I started to do, but my 8 GB SD card seems to be too small for it ;) Is it possible to cross compi

Answer 1

The Swift Package Manager got custom toolchain support via PR-1098 end of April 2017.

I wrote up detailed instructions on how to build a RaspberryPi toolchain over here: macOS -> RasPi Cross Compilation Toolchain and even the reverse (build macOS binaries on a RaspberryPi) for the fun of it. The same would work for Intel-Linux to ARM-Linux w/ minimal modifications. The SwiftPM repo contains an example script on how to do this for Intel-macOS to Intel-Ubuntu.

You can find a 2017-05-01 update on Swift-on-ARM over here: An Update on Swift 3.1.1 For Raspberry Pi Zero/1/2/3.

As a small summary, so that this answer isn't just links ;-), ARM status 2017-05-16:

• you can compile Swift 3.1/3.1.1 on RaspberryPi Ubuntu
  • don't forget to setup swap, some minimal patches are required for 3.1.1. 8GB disk may be a bit to little.
• compilation on Raspbian doesn't seem to work yet (last known version is 3.0.2)
• you can cross-compile Swift using a custom toolchain, which is reasonably easy to setup
  • you need to grab a SwiftPM snapshot (Swift 4) for this (but the toolchain itself can be 3.1 or even 3.0.2 w/ minor changes)
• you can also run (and compile) Swift via Docker, e.g. in HypriotOS.
• there is a Slack group for Swift ARM: swift-arm