Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 15.10 are currently supported

Mar 22, 2016 00:30 GMT  ·  By

After announcing the availability of the iOS 9.3, Mac OS X 10.11.4 El Capitan, watchOS 2.2, and tvOS 9.2 operating systems, as well as the Xcode 7.3 IDE, Apple now released version 2.2 of its Swift programming language for OS X and Linux.

We can't say that this comes as news to us, Linux users, as Swift 2.2 has been in development for the past few months. In the first days of December 2015, Apple announced that it makes its innovative programming language open source. The development is being tracked on GitHub, where you can get the source code.

And today, March 21, 2016, the Linux community can finally download the production version of Swift 2.2, which has been made available at the moment only for Canonical's Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) Linux kernel-based operating systems.

"Swift 2.2 includes support for Swift on Linux. The Linux port is still relatively new and in this release does not include the Swift Core Libraries (which will appear in Swift 3). The port does, however, include LLDB and the REPL," said Ted Kremenek, senior manager, Source Languages at Apple.

Swift 2.2 is distributed as part of Xcode 7.3

As expected, the Swift 2.2 programming language is distributed as part of the major Xcode 7.3 integrated development environment for Mac OS X users, but the Linux community can get the binaries for Ubuntu 15.10 or Ubuntu 14.04 LTS right now from the official download page.

There, you'll also find detailed installation instructions (scroll down near the end of the page). However, don't think that Swift 2.2 is a major update, because, according to the changelog, it's a minor maintenance release that only resolves seven reported issues, but we, the Linux community, are more than happy to have it.