Swift on Raspberry Pi

Recent developments have enabled Swift to be built for Raspberry Pi and other similar low-cost ARM linux computers. This is a look at the current landscape and where development efforts are headed in the near-term.

Transcript

1. SWIFT ON . Cameron Perry @mistercameron
2. SWIFT ON . Cameron Perry @mistercameron (Raspberry Pi)
4. HARDWARE Raspberry Pi 3 • 4-Core ARM Coretex-A53 @ 1.2GHz (64-bit armv8) • 1GB RAM, Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, HDMI • 40-pin header (lots of GPIO, etc)
5. OS • Raspbian (Debian) Jessie
 (Roughly Debian 8.0 / Ubuntu 14-ish) • Doesn’t have the most current packages
6. SWIFT ON LINUX • Apple supports Ubuntu 14 + 15 (64-bit) • Active development is on Swift 3.0 • ARM + linux isn’t officially supported https://github.com/apple/swift
7. OBJECTIVES • Get Swift • Write swift code • Compile & run the binary
8. EASY, RIGHT? famous last words
9. GETTING SWIFT Two Options: 1. Compile it yourself 2. Get binaries from somebody else
10. ARM WORK • A handful of people are working on swift-arm • Jenkins CI incremental builds • Progress on cross-compiling • Slack channel http://dev.iachieved.it/iachievedit/swift-for-arm-systems/ 
 http://swift-arm.ddns.net/
11. COMPILING • [compile command] • … • … • … • (several hours later…)
13. COMPILING • Builds fail often (but getting better) • Time consuming • Chance to have bleeding edge features
16. “CHEATING” • Swift-2.2 via apt-get (1) • Swift-3.0 tar files from Jenkins (2) 1. http://dev.iachieved.it/iachievedit/debian-packages-for-swift-on-arm/ 2. http://dev.iachieved.it/iachievedit/swift-for-arm-systems/
17. CAVEATS • Still very much Alpha software • REPL, Package Manager, and Tests don’t work • swiftc, foundation, glibc appear to work as expected
18. HELLO
19. HELLO WORLD $ swift Welcome to Apple Swift version 2.2 1> print("Hello ”) (Sorry.. REPL crashed) … Still not fixed on 3.0
20. HELLO WORLD —helloWorld.swift— print("Hello ”) $ swiftc helloWorld.swift && ./helloWorld Hello
21. GLIBC • Swift successfully links to glibc • C standard library • POSIX standard library - user land interface to kernel for system calls (open(), read(), random(), etc) • This also means you can “use” various command line tools
22. GLIBC import Foundation import Glibc let thread = NSThread(){ print("Entering thread") for i in (1...10).reverse() { print("\(i)...", terminator:"") fflush(stdout) sleep(1) } print("\nExiting thread. Done.”) exit(0) } thread.start() select(0, nil, nil, nil, nil)
23. GLIBC pi@pi3:~ $ swiftc helloWorld.swift && ./helloWorld Entering thread 10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1... Exiting thread. Done
24. RESOURCES • http://mistercameron.com • http://dev.iachieved.it/iachievedit/ • http://swift-arm.ddns.net
25. NEXT TIME • Updates to Swift 3.0 • Using Swift for GPIO on Pi
26. Cameron Perry @mistercameron mistercameron.com