Matt Jacobson
November 2022

Swift is officially supported on Darwin, Linux, and Windows. Some people have put in work to get it running on FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but lately the FreeBSD port has succumbed to bit rot.

A few weeks ago, I started working on getting the FreeBSD port working again. I'm going to try something new where I attempt to use a blog entry for my project notes, with the hopes that it'll force me to organize them better.

This document is likely incomplete and incorrect.

Completed work

Changes required for Swift 5.7

• Build system fix in configure_unix_sdk; PR merged
• Workaround for <unwind.h> craziness; PR abandoned
• Build fix in swift-dependency-tool; PR merged
• Define CLongDouble; PR merged
• Define RTLD_DEFAULT; PR merged
• Another build system fix in configure_unix_sdk; PR
• Use lld, not gold; PR merged, PR merged
• Fix bootstrapped build; PR merged
• Don't pass -nostdsysteminc in ClangImporter; PR
• Recognize amd64 in CMAKE_SYSTEM_PROCESSOR (minor); PR
• Fix build of SwiftReflectionTest; PR
• Install SwiftGlibc.h in swift_static resources; PR

Other changes

These are fixes for bugs introduced after 5.7.

• Fix FreeBSD build in lib/Threading; PR merged
• Move clang include path management from frontend to driver; patch accepted

Work in progress

• Problem finding SwiftGlibc due to ClangImporter's looking at driver arguments—need to backport clang change
• stdlib dylibs are not being given an RPATH, which prevents them from being linked; patch prepared
• Float methods use LLVM intrinsics like @llvm.round, which require libm, which is not linked; patch prepared

This stuff will be updated on an ongoing basis:

• A docs page on how to build on FreeBSD
• A ports tree entry
• Swift 5.7 + FreeBSD fixes branch

Future directions

• Get dispatch up and running
• Add swift-driver to build