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what i am pondering is: is it easier in theory to port swift to freebsd rather than linux? the facts that macOs has shared history with freebsd tells me yes, the fact that llvm favors linux (?) tells me both.

also, congrats, the swift and freebsd are ambitious in terms of new deployment platforms and compatibility! (see embedded swift, oci freebsd containers, freebsd on firecracker)



> is it easier in theory to port swift to freebsd rather than linux? the facts that macOs has shared history with freebsd tells me yes

That shared history goes back a LONG way. The base components from FreeBSD that are in macOS are absolutely ancient. I think the most modern shared components are just the userland tools.

So I don't think it would make much difference at all.


Why would llvm favor linux? FreeBSD also officially moved from GCC to LLVM for the base system, so I don't see why LLVM wouldn't support it.


a good question, my line of thinking was: if llvm allows easy ports to freebsd, why is freebsd always a lower tier than linux in llvm based projects?

weak reasoning, as it might just be a supply/demand and not a product quality question


> Why…

It’s almost always available resources.


Possibly demand as well. We know that Apple operates a whole bunch of Linux servers, do we know if they’re running FreeBSD internally?


I would say that LLVM is more important to FreeBSD than it is to Linux.


I don’t know whether you know, but there has been a Linux port for quite a while (https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-linux-port/ is from December 2015).

https://www.swift.org/install/linux/ points to https://hub.docker.com/_/swift, which has images for Red Hat, Amazon Linux, maybe others.




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