How to Manage Toolchains in Xcode
Using alternative toolchains in Xcode to test out new Swift features before your project is ready
Swift development isn’t slowing down in any way. New versions are being released a few times a year. New releases do not only contain some minor fixes and improvements but we also often get some new features as well.
Most importantly, however, we want to prepare our applications for a new Swift version. Even though we, developers, are not forced to use the newest Swift version right away when it is released, it might still be good to be ready for it.
Especially if your application depends on some third-party frameworks since those will sooner rather than later be updated to support the new Swift version.
Usually, we can compile them anyway with backward compatibility by setting older Swift versions for that framework but sometimes, the new version of Swift brings a great addition that it is just too good not to use.
How can we use a new Swift version that has not been released with the latest available Xcode yet? Or, maybe you are short on free disk space (sooner or later we all know that feeling, I think…) and do not want to install a new version of Xcode yet?
