How to Install Swift language on Ubuntu 20.04

Swift is a modern, fast, and powerful general-purpose programming language. Mainly it is used for iOS app development but, you can use it for systems programming, cloud services, and design other applications. Powerful error handling and Advanced control flow are some of the features of this language.

Other features include,

Closures unified with function pointers

Tuples and multiple return values
Fast and concise iteration over a range or collection
Structs that support methods, extensions, and protocols
Functional programming patterns, e.g., map and filter
Compiled and optimized to get the most out of modern hardware
Type inference and pattern matching with a modern, lightweight syntax

Easier to write, read and maintain as well.

Let’s install Swift on Ubuntu Linux.

Install Swift on Ubuntu 20.04

Swift needs the below software/library to run properly. You need to install them as sudo user.

$ sudo apt-get install \
          binutils \
          git \
          gnupg2 \
          libc6-dev \
          libcurl4 \
          libedit2 \
          libgcc-9-dev \
          libpython2.7 \
          libsqlite3-0 \
          libstdc++-9-dev \
          libxml2 \
          libz3-dev \
          pkg-config \
          tzdata \
          zlib1g-dev

Swift is available for multiple platforms from Apple Xcode to Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows, Amazon Linux. You can download it from here.

Here we are interested in Ubuntu, so depending on your Ubuntu version, download the Swift installer. You can also download a development snapshot if you want to contribute to the development of the language.

Go to the Downloads folder and extract the tar archive using the command given below.

$ tar xzf swift-<VERSION>-<PLATFORM>.tar.gz

In my case it is,

$ tar xzf swift-5.3.3-RELEASE-ubuntu20.04.tar.gz

Move the extracted file either /user/share/swift or /opt/swift directory. That’s it and your swift installation is complete.

sudo mv swift-5.3-RELEASE-ubunutu20.04 /usr/share/swift

Update system PATH environment variable

echo "export PATH=/usr/share/swift/usr/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Just type below on terminal check installation.

swift -v

Output
Swift version 5.3.3 (swift-5.3.3-RELEASE)
Target: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
/usr/share/swift/usr/bin/lldb "--repl=-disable-objc-interop -color-diagnostics"
Welcome to Swift version 5.3.3 (swift-5.3.3-RELEASE).
Type :help for assistance.
1>

Summary

You can’t install Xcode on Ubuntu Linux as it is not available for any Linux Distributions as of today. But, you can always install Swift on Linux and learn App Development

Go ahead install swift and start learning it.

Install Swift on Ubuntu 20.04

Summary

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