First, I apologize to everybody. This announcement should have been made 1 month ago.

Due to personal and professional matters, and as some of you might have guessed, there is simply no possibility for me at the moment to allocate time to 1) process support requests with the same level of support as usuals and 2) complete the next update which would bring support for Swift 6 and iOS 18.

I am forced to concentrate on some urgent things.

*This is, hopefully, a temporary situation* and I should recover more time, hopefully, by october.

Also, please note this second information:

*The next update of this toolchain will be delayed because it requires a major change.*

Why it is necessary, and why now: since 2009 I've been striving to make building Apple and iOS programs with 100% native Windows tools possible by finding more and more ways to circumvent Microsoft platform limitations while catching up with Apple's latest developments. This cat-and-mouse technique did the job with good success for 15 years (I've been a good cat). Yet, with LLVM 17 and Swift 6.0 I have finally reached a dead end and I'm technically out of options. I am finally forced to migrate all the native Windows tools of this toolchain to WSL2 (the Windows Subsystem for Linux) if I want to be able to simply build the latest Apple tools.

This drastic change implies several things.
1) The support for Win7 will be dropped (this is not too much of an inconvenience for many I suppose)
2) Local admin privileges might be mandatory in order to use this toolchain (it will no longer be possible to build iOS apps from an unprivileged Windows user account)
3) Those who integrated these tools in their own build pipeline will need to redo it completely (I will provide help and explanations in the documentation as much as I can)
4) The build performance should not be affected, because the losses incurred by working in a virtualized WSL2 environment will be compensated by the removal of the various POSIX compatibility layers that were stacked up along these years to get the tools to work on Win32, it is even possible that the performances improve.

Porting all these tools to WSL2 should not be a daunting work, but the various scripts that articulate them altogether into a consistent build process will need to be rewritten from scratch. Because of this and due to the current situation, do not expect this update to happen before november at best.

Finally

I reiterate my apologies for the current situation and will do my best to recover time. If this is not possible and the situation doesn't improve in a few months (unlikely, but I can't exclude that possibility), chances exist that I free the source code and make it open source so that this work can be continued.

People interested in investing time or money in this toolchain might find it interesting to know this beforehand.

Thank you for reading

Please share this announcement to your friends and colleagues who use this toolchain.