The Browser Company's Saleem Abdulrasool details a year of improvements to Swift on Windows, focusing on reliability and developer experience rather than new features. Key work includes rebuilding the runtime build system with modern CMake, creating the Experimental Swift SDK with multiple distribution models, and implementing static linking to eliminate runtime version mismatch issues caused by Windows DLL Path ordering. The post covers the Windows linking model (import vs static libraries), disabling library-evolution mode to reflect Windows' lack of ABI stability, side-by-side runtime deployment support, and real-world validation through tools like SwiftFormat and SwiftLint. Additional improvements include a Clang Importer feature for Win32 macro aliases (ImportMacroAliases), toolchain distribution with Asserts/NoAsserts variants, mimalloc integration for ~4% compile speedup, and SBOM generation for supply chain transparency.
