We have been hard at work to bring the Swift toolchain to FreeBSD. A preview Swift bundle for FreeBSD 14.3+ is available at https://download.swift.org/tmp-ci-nightly/development/freebsd-14_ci_latest.tar.gz. The bundle contains a Swift development compiler and Swift runtimes needed for compiling Swift programs on, and for, FreeBSD 14 on x86_64 machines.
Dependencies
The Swift compiler and runtimes have a few dependencies. Please install the following dependencies:
- zlib-ng
- python3
- sqlite3
- libuuid
- curl
Known Issues
The compiler in the bundle is still under development and isn’t part of a release yet and we’re not quite done porting everything to FreeBSD.
Here is a list of known issues that you may run into while trying things out.
- Thread sanitizer reports incorrect failures
- LLDB is unable to execute Swift expressions
- Command Plugins in a SwiftPM package hangs
- Using standard types with C++ interop results in an undefined voidify symbol
- Importing the C libraries is done through “Glibc”. This will change to
import FreeBSD lldandlldbdepend onlibxml2.so.2, which is not be available in the system package manager.
We are investigating adding aarch64 support and making the bundle available for all minor versions of FreeBSD 14.
As you find more bugs, please file issues at https://github.com/swiftlang/swift/issues.
We look forward to hearing your feedback. If you’re interested in helping add the finishing polish, please feel free to reach out here on the forums.
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On FreeBSD 15, the following error occurs when executing swift.
ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libutil.so.9" not found, required by "swift"
As a temporary workaround, doas pkg install compat14x-amd64 will solve the issue.
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Great news, thank you. Registered to this forum just to say that.
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On FreeBSD 15, the following error occurs when executing
swift.
Yes, the FreeBSD stability policy appears to be within a major version. The bundle is built for FreeBSD 14. I’m glad to see that you were able to find a workaround though.
For -STABLE branches, it’s important to make sure that ABI is compatible across dot releases (in other words, user can expect applications that is compiled for X.0 would run without modification on any X.y releases). We also try to maintain ABI compatibility across .0 releases, but they are not strictly enforced except for libraries that already implements versioned symbols.
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